On 18 1 2005 at 7:15 pm -0500, Ross Wm. Rader wrote: >In the typical dumb implementation that you see most everywhere >nowadays, yes. It doesn't have to be as heavyweight as you will >typically find it today - just most designers have been lazy on this >point thus far...
Are you saying that the RSS mechanism provides a way for the client to say "only send me stuff that is newer than $DATE"? If so, then it does sound like an implementation problem that the RSS source could improve. Otherwise, however, it would be akin to a POP3 server sending summaries of your most recent 20 e-mail messages every time you logged in, regardless whether you had seen them before. Anyway I'll stop speculating on this now and try to learn about RSS soon. >Someone else was explaining offline that the difference in mechanism is >rather small, but the difference in *source* is significant. Most people >get their mail from a relatively local server whereas NNTP and RSS are >more remote and centralized. I would argue that it is an academic distinction though. A given group of data D, going out to persons X, Y and Z, still has to be transmitted three times (from the source to each of the recipients). With a mailing list, that happens as an SMTP session between the mail server and the recipients' MX; with a web page or RSS, it happens as an HTTP session between the web server and the recipients' machines, etc. Whether the end user retrieves the e-mail from his intermediary MX/POP3 server or gets it directly from an HTTP source is irrelevant to the fact that the originating source still has to provide it many times in the first place. -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca
