Re: [xri] Demoting 'priority' requirement

[Will Norris <will@willnorris.com>]

Ahh, I completely misread that.  I was thinking this was talking about  
consumers.  In that case, I'm 100% in favor of changing this to MAY.   
Sorry for the confusion.

-will


On Aug 20, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Will Norris [mailto:will@willnorris.com]
>> Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 12:31 PM
>> To: XRI TC
>> Subject: Re: [xri] Demoting 'priority' requirement
>>
>>
>> On Aug 20, 2009, at 12:01 PM, Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote:
>>
>>> I would like to change the use of the 'priority' attribute from
>>> 'should' to 'may' as in:
>>>
>>> "When these elements appear more than once within the same parent,
>>> XRD publishers *MAY* use the priority attribute to prioritize
>>> selection of these element instances."
>>>
>>> The 'priority' attribute is the one thing about XRD I hear the most
>>> complaints about.
>>
>> What is the actual complaint?  Concern about the extra processing?
>
> No. The extra work by publishers when it makes no actual difference.  
> This is about publishers, not clients.
>
>>> While it is an important and powerful feature, I am not sure what
>>> value is gained by making it a 'should'. The sentence above also
>>> fails to point that multiple Links with different Rel values have no
>>> use of priority if the Rel values do not repeat across links.
>>> Changing it to 'may' solves that.
>>
>> Then we should change the sentence to reflect that fact if need be.
>> The section on resource selection seems to do a pretty good job of
>> pointing out that Links are first filtered based on a selection
>> criteria and *then* sorted by priority.  This is indeed an important
>> feature, and the softer we word it, the more likely are to see it
>> implemented inconsistently.  If the XRD publisher goes to the effort
>> of explicitly specifying a priority preference, then I do think that
>> consumers **should** respect that priority.
>
> Again, I am only talking about the publisher part. The client should  
> still respect that explicit priorities set by the publisher.