Rob Howard: We're going to try and get back to the point
where full RSS feeds can be offered. While there are lot of good
RSS clients out there, there are also plenty of bad ones that don't
honor all the HTTP codes.
To be fair, most of the
HTTP
headers involved are optional, and most developers are not
accustomed to dealing with the protocol at this level.
So when I first heard about RSS, by first thought was WOW, cool, neat, but shouldn't it also have a event driven distribution model?
Email being the most common model of event distributed data, what if my aggregator ran through my email and pulled out RSS notifications and displayed them in the aggregator.
The power of RSS is XML, HTTP while cool is just the transport. SMTP on the other had would allow a event based or push model.
I'm not arguing that we should do away with the http pull model, but that there are other solutions. RSS should have an option that allows consumer aggregators to communicate back an email destination for pushed content.
I currently use bloglines as an aggregator. Bloglines is really a supper aggregator, it pulls feed then your web browser pulls.
Your aggregator becomes the leaf in a hierarchical tree rather that a node in a point to point graph. Bloglines even gives you an email address to use to subscribe to mailing lists so that messges on the list can appear in your aggregator as news.
SMTP transport could theoretically be replaced with a peer to peer distribution system.
I guess I've described NNTP, well not quite. But close.
MS could make things a little easier on themselves by including GZip/deflate support in the .NET Framework HttpWebClient, and making it easy to turn on, or on by default. My employer has worked hard to get our customers to use Accept-Encoding, but we've ended up having to provide the code for .NET customers to do this, and even then, some haven't been able to get it enabled. We're doing SOAP, not RSS, but the problem is the same, you can't throw all this stuff on the wire and not expect to take a hit.
The other day, on Scoble's blog, he announced that MSDN was having problems keeping up with the bandwidth demands of RSS aggregators. Well, if Microsoft can't handle it, then it's definitely a problem, right? Many people have chimed in about...
Is there some sort of test suite for checking whether one's own weblog installation follows the patterns - something like the feed validator, but looking not at the content, but at the protocol headers? If not - why not? :-)
Microsoft's recent troubles with RSS files have focused the RSS/Atom communities squarely on fundamental problems with feed syndication as practiced today. While some of us have been warning about this problem for quite a while, it has taken Microsoft's recent...
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Mark Fletcher comments on the recent RSS bandwidth discussions, pointing to recommendations from FeedDemon's Nick Bradbury and also to Sam Ruby's HTTP Best Practices....