Bogus Reasons Why RSS is not Ready for Prime Time
Dare Obasanjo provides some good answers to this list of complaints about RSS. I especially like this one on bandwidth concerns:
The existing Web architecture provides a couple of ways for polling based applications to save bandwidth including HTTP conditional GET and gzip compression over HTTP. Very few web sites actually support both well-known bandwidth saving techniques including the Dylan Green based on a quick check with Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer. Using both techniques can save bandwidth costs by an order of magnitude (by a factor of 10 for the mathematically challenged). Before coming up with sophisticated hacks for perceived problems it'd be nice if website administrators actually used existing best practices before trying to reinvent the wheel in more complex ways.
That said, it would be a nice additional optimization for web sites to only provide only the items that hadn't been read by a particular client for each request for the RSS feed. However I'd like to see us learn to crawl before we try to walk.
Well said. BottomFeeder supports both mechanisms - but it is astonishing to see how few sites do either one
Comments
No mod_gzip here
[Take the First Step] January 24, 2004 18:38:20.483
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No mod_gzip here
I'm guilty as charged. I have a fairly typical hosting plan: charged for disk space and bandwidth above my base allocation with all CPU cycles included. Since it would shift usage from a metered resource (bandwidth) to an unmetered resource (CPU cycles), there is no motivation for my host to provide mod_gzip. Weblog software should have the option to generate both a normal and a gzipped RSS feed. Then we could turn on gzip content encoding and apache would serve the gzipped version when appropriate. This swaps between two metered services and doesn't require a change to the billing model. I think that hosting providers could buy into that. ...
Re: Bogus Reasons Why RSS is not Ready for Prime Time
[ngbranitsky] January 24, 2004 20:08:19.850
Comment on Bogus Reasons Why RSS is not Ready for Prime Time by ngbranitsky
I was looking at an item titled: Blogger is Atom enabled at http://taosecurity.blogspot.com and was surprised to see a screen snapshot of BottomFeeder! It apparently works well in FreeBSD with the Linux ABI. RSS and Atom. "We play both kinds of music here. Country and Western!"