A self-declared flag is exactly what an index cannot verify. Whoever runs the host creates the publisher feed, and the field records what that owner considers itself to be. One person with a single re...
A little bit of context: someone came up with publisher feeds to prove publishership of RSS feeds.
Later, vc-funded companies who publish other people's feeds for a living decided that they needed to use publisher feeds to gather their artists' feeds together, as publisher feeds are the only way to prove links between feeds.
Meanwhile, small-time labels saw the word "publisher" and assumed it was reserved for publishers who publish, so they used it for their label's artists.
And here is where we are today: sometimes the link means artist, sometimes it does not, and anything else (arbitrary strings) is unproven guesswork.
My proposal is to let indexes not have to guess what the (only provable) link means; specify the link type. This way, we can prove and link whatever we want forever and all the time.
Later, vc-funded companies who publish other people's feeds for a living decided that they needed to use publisher feeds to gather their artists' feeds together, as publisher feeds are the only way to prove links between feeds.
Meanwhile, small-time labels saw the word "publisher" and assumed it was reserved for publishers who publish, so they used it for their label's artists.
And here is where we are today: sometimes the link means artist, sometimes it does not, and anything else (arbitrary strings) is unproven guesswork.
My proposal is to let indexes not have to guess what the (only provable) link means; specify the link type. This way, we can prove and link whatever we want forever and all the time.
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