On 25 Aug 2005, at 15:45, Joe Gregorio wrote:
On 8/25/05, James M Snell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Up to this point, the vast majority of use cases for Atom feeds is
the
traditional syndicated content case. A bunch of content updates that
are designed to be distributed and aggregated within Feed readers or
online aggregators, etc. But with Atom providing a much more
flexible
content model that allows for data that may not be suitable for
display
within a feed reader or online aggregator, I'm wondering what the
best
way would be for a publisher to indicate that a feed should not be
aggregated?
For example, suppose I build an application that depends on an
Atom feed
containing binary content (e.g. a software update feed). I don't
really
want aggregators pulling and indexing that feed and attempting to
display it within a traditional feed reader. What can I do?
First, on this scenario, I would be inclined to make the firmware
an enclosure
and not included base64.
+1 definitely.
But I still can see a scenario you might be serving up queries via
Atom and those
queries could be 'heavy'. There are, of course, several things you
could do:
1. Cache the results.
2. Support ETags
3. Support ETags and 'fake' them so that they change only once a
day, maybe
once a week even.
I would put the following as the most obvious solution
0. have the content link to the file either by using enclosures or
content by reference such as
<content type="application/patch" src="/patch.patch" />
There should be a golden rule: never place binary content in xml. It
is ugly and completely
unnecessary. Do we put base64 encoded stuff in html? No: that is why
there are things like
<img src="...">
Henry
There are undoubtedly others, but the more important part is that
your 'do not
aggregate' doesn't really solve the problem. I could, for example,
take one of your
heavy search feeds, convert it to HTML via XSLT and include that
via iframe
in my home page. *That* traffic is going to be a lot worse than an
aggregator
subscription and wouldn't fit the definition of 'aggregation'.
-joe
--
Joe Gregorio http://bitworking.org
