trwnh.com/unified.test.hugo/content/kb/activitypub/shortcomings/collections-underspecced.md

1.1 KiB

collections are kinda underspecced tbh

loosely inspired by the submission of FEP-5bf0 Collection sorting and filtering

filtering

you could pre-create collections that contain a subset of items, but there's no way to dynamically do server-side filtering; this has to be done client-side by downloading the entire collection and creating any useful indices

sorting

OrderedCollection is mandated reverse-chronological but it should have been possible to specify the ordering

taking schema.org/ItemList and schema.org/ListItem as prior art:

  • ListItem.position is the index
  • ItemList.itemListOrder is the type of ordering
    • itemListOrderAscending
    • itemListOrderDescending
    • itemListUnordered

what might this imply is needed for activitypub?

  • orderedBy?
    • what about multiple ordering criteria? SQL has ORDER BY
    • actually, is a query language a good fit here?
  • reversed? more like order: Ascending or order: Descending?

querying

how do you tell if an arbitrary object is included in a collection or not? without iterating over the entire collection, that is.

constraining range

how do you know what a collection contains?