Abstract
Specify that the order of atom:entry elements within an Atom Feed Document is not significant.
Status
Open
Author: DavidPowell
Rationale
Atom 0.3 stated that:
Ordering of the element children of atom:feed element MUST NOT be considered significant.
This text seems to have got lost somewhere during the introduction of atom:head. Currently the specification doesn't say whether entries are ordered or not, which is likely to lead to confusion.
If the specification is not clear about whether processors are supposed to preserve the order of entries or not, then some database-based implementations might preserve the order and others might not.
Proposal
Add the following sentence to Section 4.1 :
This specification assigns no significance to the order of atom:entry elements within the feed. Processors MAY present entries in a different order to which they are appear in an Atom Feed Document.
Impacts
Notes
This proposal is based on draft-ietf-atompub-format-05.txt.