: What should a shop's products news feed contain? I'm thinking about integrating some sort of (Atom) news feed into a shopping system, but I'm not sure how to go about it, except that I want

@Shanna517

updated (which is required) must contain the date/time of the last significant modification (e.g., price change, added/removed features, etc., but not for corrections of spelling mistakes, or some unimportant change of a description).

published (which is optional) contains the date since when the product is added to the shop.

You must not change the id when you update a product (an entry needs to have the same id "across all time and space", i.e., if you have a product which is contained in several different feeds, always use the same id for it.)


Or should the feed only contain actual changes to the data, like "Product X now costs Y.YY"?


Unusual, but possible, of course (in this case, you’d need to use a new id for each entry!). I’d expect such a feed for a single product, not for category entries resp. search results. But if you think this is useful to your visitors, why not add both feeds?

<link rel="alternate"
type="application/atom+xml"
href="red-shoes-for-women_products.xml"
title="All products in the 'Red shoes (women)' category" />

<link rel="alternate"
type="application/atom+xml"
href="red-shoes-for-women_changes.xml"
title="All changes to products in the 'Red shoes (women)' category" />


(Note that the first feed in the head element should be the more important (resp. default) one.)

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