Subject: Linking Atom Entries to 'Category Feeds'

From: Colm Divilly <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:33:23 +0100

I'm trying to design a mechanism for annotating an Atom Entry with links 
to 'category feeds' (a feed that lists all other entries having the same 
category term), one link per <atom:category> element included in the 
entry. I can think of two ways to do this:

1.

<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
 ...
 <link rel="related" type="application/atom+xml;type=feed" 
href="http://example.org/categories/robots/"/>
 <category scheme="urn:uuid:044d0398-2fd0-4eda-a884-8d22a6ac3b8e" 
term="robots"/>
 ...
</entry>

2.

<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
 ...
 <category scheme="urn:uuid:044d0398-2fd0-4eda-a884-8d22a6ac3b8e" 
term="robots">
  <link type="application/atom+xml;type=feed" 
href="http://example.org/categories/robots/"/>
 </category>
 ...
</entry>

The goal is to enable clients to navigate the 'category space' 
discovering entries that are similarly categorized. I see Option 1. as 
more likely to be broadly understood, e.g. a generic feed reader would 
be able to understand and make available the 'related' link to the user, 
but I find it lacking because it does not directly relate the link to 
the category to which it applies. Therefore I favour Option 2. but I 
expect that not to be understood by anything other than my own 
application client.

I'm guessing others have tried modeling something similar, anyone have 
any thoughts on the above proposals, or alternative approaches?

Regards,
Colm Divilly

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:02:16 +0000

I've used option 1 for this in the past. Seems to be good enough. 

------Original Message------
From: Colm Divilly
Sender: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Linking Atom Entries to 'Category Feeds'
Sent: Jun 10, 2009 10:33 AM

1.

2.

Regards,
Colm Divilly

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry