Re: Saving Bandwidth on RSS Feed Details

Rogers wrote:
> 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.

I would think you'd still need to send the full feed by default for 
backwards compatibility with clients that don't understand your new minimal 
format. And then those clients that were willing to except the minimal feed 
would include some kind of HTTP header to identify that capability to the 
server.

At that stage though, you have no need for a link to an external source. If 
a client decides that it wants the full feed details, it just doesn't 
include the magic HTTP header. And if the server wants to force the full 
details down to client in the event of an update, it can just ignore the 
header (possibly based on etags or If-Modified-Since for clients that have 
already been updated).

However, your problem now is how this will all be handled by proxy servers. 
You're going to need to include a Vary header of some sort. How well that 
works may depend on the kind of header you use to signal support for this 
capability.

And at the end of the day, I'm not sure it's really worth all the effort. 
You're proposing keeping a bunch of elements that I'd be happy to see 
dropped, but not keeping ones that I'd consider essential. I imagine 
everyone's opinion on this would differ though, so the end result may never 
satisfy anyone.

With compression enabled, is it really going to save you that much 
bandwidth?

Regards
James



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