It's a nice theory
Tim Bray thinks that technology will solve the ID problem in feeds:
With Atom, every entry is required to have both a universally-unique ID and a field called updated, the time-stamp when the publisher thinks it last changed. That means that if ever I see the same entry twice, that’s a bug! There’s no wiggle room, somebody’s breaking a rule and I can track it down and harass them until they fix it.
Yeah, right. This assumes a lot - like every content aggregator in the food chain preserving id tags. RSS 2.0 has GUIDs already, and I can tell you, not all content aggregators preserve them - many of them just go ahead and create their own. Atom will not wave a magic wand and fix bad practice.
The only way to deal with ths problem is a system like NNTP, but I don't see that happening.
Comments
Not bad in practice
[Danny] April 4, 2005 16:19:16.689
I don't think the assumptions go too far, I've yet to see rewriting of IDs in RSS 1.0 where an item URI is already required. But GUIDs in RSS 2.0 are entirely optional and there's no standard approach to their construction, so I'm not surprised to hear republishing aggregators are inserting new ones. But you are of course right that Atom won't fix bad practice. But maybe it might at least help point practice in the right general direction.