Dare Obasanjo: At this point I'd like to note that HTTP
provides two mechanisms for web servers to tell clients if a
network resource has changed or not. The basics of this mechanism
is explained in the blog post
HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers which provides a way to
prevent clients such as news readers from repeatedly downloading a
Web document if it hasn't been updated.
The functionality is clearly there in HTTP. The word is
clearly not getting out to everywhere it should be.
Todo:
Propose language for Atom that the Last-Modified, ETag, and
Content-Transfer-Encoding headers that HTTP specifications
indicates MAY be used in HTTP protocols, SHOULD be used in the case
of
Atom.
Update the
feedvalidator to provide
warnings when feeds are detected that don't support these
headers. This would apply not only to Atom, but also to all
flavors of RSS.
I can't change the world, but these two actions I can take.
More on RSS bandwidth consumption
A few months back I wrote about RSS bandwidth consumption, and this subject is again in the news following Chad Dickerson's recent InfoWorld column about his love/hate relationship with RSS. Dickerson notes that desktop RSS readers which hit a feed...
In this day of RSS, the ones that really bug me are the services that will download your HTML and send mail to people when it changes.
I've had two of those show up recently, both without using any conditional GET logic. That's my bandwidth they're stealing...
I'd love to figure out a server-side solution; some way to blacklist people who download the same page (or image) over and over again without conditionals...
As Dare notes, people need to be reminded of Conditional-GET and GZIP, with respect to RSS, periodically. It's come up again, and people are trying to get the word out again. I'm sort of stunned that Slashdot's CmdrTaco would say "RSS (or as it...
As InfoWorld's CTO, Chad Dickerson, posted here, InfoWorld has been noticing a lot of congestion at the top of the hour when thousands of RSS clients all hit our servers simultaneously to check for updated feeds. We've done a number......
[more]
Nick Bradbury, -el autor de Feeddemon- publica un post de obligada lectura para todo aquel a quien le preocupe el tráfico generado por los lectores RSS de tipo cliente. Aunque esto ya ha sido tema de debate, esta vez es a raíz de una columna...
As InfoWorld's CTO, Chad Dickerson, posted here, InfoWorld has been noticing a lot of congestion at the top of the hour when thousands of RSS clients all hit our servers simultaneously to check for updated feeds. We've done a number......
[more]