Dates for Atom Entries

The “three dates” model provides created, issued, and modified dates.

What bothers me most about reissuing an essay is that the new content replaces the old. On the one or two occasions when I’ve done this, I’ve struggled to preserve the original essay somewhere in the revised essay so that readers could see both what I originally said and what I’m saying now.

Somewhere in the long discussion of dates on the Atom syntax mailing list, I became convinced that we could simplify the whole thing by just having two dates: issued and modified.

Issued is when the essay was published. Publication happens once and history is never revised. Small changes, fixing links or typos, updates the modified date, but the original content is never changed in significant ways. (This is a partly social contract, of course, there’s nothing that can prevent me from completely changing an essay without updating either date.)

Then the question is, what happens when someone wants to change an essay in some significant way? The right answer, I now think, is to publish a new essay and use metadata to indicate that it replaces the old one. The DCMI Metadata Terms, particularly replaces and isReplacedBy seem ideally suited to this purpose.

This essay demonstrates how that might work. (It supersedes Three Dates for Atom .)

Further discussion on the list leads me to think that I haven’t actually contributed to consensus. C’est la vie. At the very least, I was spurred to implement the idea on this site.