Atom - the suckage starts
Scott Johnson of Feedster fame asks what we think of the embedding of binary content in Atom Feeds.
Ok, here's my take - it makes Atom less than useless as a syndication format. Why? Well, say someone slaps a large piece of binary content in some item in their feed. Now I have to download that content over and over again for the next N days - until the owner of the feed has added enough new items that it ages off. Heck, With RSS enclosures (not that I actually support that yet in BottomFeeder), the aggregator can leave it entirely up to the end user as to whether an enclosure link gets followed or not. With the Atom approach, the feed provider has the option to be completely anti-social (for instance - say I'm traveling and on a slow link - no thanks to your 3 MB binary content on dialup!). Even on a fast link, the binary data is now downloaded and will likely be saved - for no good reason, I might add - in the aggregator's save file. This goes right up there in the hall of shame with my user hostile software post.
Here's a big no thanks - go ruin someone else's day with this idea
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Comments
Etags
[] July 31, 2003 10:01:14.139
Hi, Etags should make this better but not every system supports them by far and they are kinda flaky at times. Scott
Re: Etags
[James Robertson] August 1, 2003 15:18:48.724
Comment on Etags by James Robertson
No, Etags don't help. That tells the client whether or not the document (as a whole) is different. So if an Atom feed has a large biniary object in it, every single time the feed gets updated (which may be frequently in the case of a blog), the client has to download the whole thinig again. Only after you get the document do you learn that you've seen the large binary object before.