Sync, Part 2
James Holderness: “FWIW I’m not interested in anything more complicated than your tombstone proposal from last year. I just want a simple way to mark an item in a feed as deleted. I was considering implementing something based on your last draft, even if only for personal use. It would be preferable if there was a real spec to work from, but there’s no way I would implement anything as complicated as SSE when all I want to do is delete spam.”
James is referring to this expired draft. Like I said in my previous post, this is not a new problem. His comment is spot on; for the overwhelming majority of use cases, the ability to explicitly indicate that an entry has been deleted is enough to get the job done. For that purpose alone, I think the x:deleted element I proposed in my previous post should be capable of standing alone, without being required to bring along a complex processing model for detecting and resolving conflicts, etc. The most of the remaining use cases, the ability to request a feed listing only the items that have changed within a specific period of time is more than sufficient. The more complicated conflict detection and resolution mechanisms defined in SSE are really needed only for a small subset of cases.