[Cosmo-dev] abbreviating content of entries in atom collections

[Brian Moseley]

at the moment, when a client requests a feed for an item collection,
each entry in the feed contains the entire representation of its
associated item. this is a pretty hefty amount of data for even just
your basic event item. i wonder if clients actually need the entire
item state in this instance? when the web ui renders the dashboard
view or calendar view based on the contents of a feed, what specific
data does it require?

maybe we could define a slimmer item representation that's just used
in feed content (maybe one for dashboard feeds and one for calendar
feeds). then, when the ui needs to populate the detail view, or to
refresh the calendar or dashboard based on an item update, it can
request the item entry directly, which would return the entire state
of the item.

this is analogous to the traditional mail client, which fetches a few
headers for each message to populate its list view and then pulls down
an entire message to populate its detail view.