Re: Saving Bandwidth on RSS Feed Details

--- In [email protected], "Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@...> wrote:
> In theory this info is already coming with the feed as part of the > HTTP headers. Use the data that's already present.

By "this info" you mean the date-time of last update, correct? I can see why it would be better to make a HEAD request to the feed details feed to determine whether it was updated, but it would mean an extra request most of the time to be told there was nothing new.

> What evidence exists to prove there would be any uptake of it?

That's a good question. There's a chicken-egg problem here. If I adopted the namespace today, it would make my feed less capable to every RSS client that doesn't support the namespace.

Perhaps the namespace could be used only for requests from clients that support RFC3229+feed, since they're already trying to optimize bandwidth and would be more receptive to the proposal. Anyone know some of the bigger clients that support this?

Randy Charles Morin made this comment on my blog: "A similar solution to feedDetails is X-Include. It's already well documented and understood. A downfall of these approaches is that they actually increases connections, which is often more important than bandwidth when you are scaling RSS."

What do people think about putting these optional elements in a separate file and using X-Include [1] to incorporate them? Would clients make HEAD requests to determine whether they needed an updated copy, or just request the included file every time they requested the feed?

1: http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/



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