Open ldodds opened 6 years ago
In both cases the modified property's invariant holds, which is "It must be appropriately comparable to itself as either a string or integer, representing a chronological ordering". It is more useful to think about it as a ordered E-Tag rather than a modified date in this respect, as the primary purpose is cache invalidation and ensuring that any consuming System 2 can process items in parallel without depending solely on the order in which they appear in the feed.
To make this example real: as long as every page is processed and the pages are retrieved following the next URL, the items themselves can e.g. enter geolocation queue or a manual validation queue based on their contents without concern for halting reading of the feed until such items are resolved.
The ordering strategy that uses change numbers means that the
modified
property no longer contains a reliable date that the record changed. In this case it contains a version number.When a publisher is using an alternative strategy, it should be indicated, e.g. by including the change number as a separate key. The
modified
property can then be retained as a time stamp if/when available.