Saving Bandwidth on RSS Feed Details

With the current interest in rssCloud and PubSubHubbub (PuSH), I've been thinking about all the bandwidth that's consumed by the RSS elements that describe the feed. When a client requests an RSS feed 14 times in one day, it gets the basic details of the feed -- title, link, image, ttl and so on -- 14 times even though most of them stay the same for months if not years.

James Holderness directed me to RFC3229+feed, a method to request partial RSS feeds that omit elements that a client has already seen. Here's information on that:

http://www.wyman.us/main/2004/09/using_rfc3229_w.html

But as far as I can determine, this approach still sends all of the channel elements that describe the feed itself. I wanted to float an idea here to see if mailing list members think it would be useful:

<rssboard:feedDetails>http://ekzemplo.com/feedinfo.rss</rssboard:feedDetails>

This channel-level RSS element identifies a URL that contains the full details about the feed. The details would be expressed as an RSS feed without any item elements.

An optional ttl attribute could contain the number of days the publisher would like clients to cache the information before checking it again:

<rssboard:feedDetails ttl="30">http://ekzemplo.com/feedinfo.rss</rssboard:feedDetails>

A publisher who wished to make use of this would be advised to move all channel elements except for title, link, description and atom:link to the detail URL. Title, link and description are required in RSS, and atom:link identifies the feed's URL so it can't be moved.



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