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.
RSS is just an XML based document format. It can contain whatever the client and server agree it should contain.
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.
Precisely like that.
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.
It seems that the concerns are more related to reliability and availability instead of transport. Additionally, because RSS isn't widely adopted (but is trending in that direction) and web forums generally suck *and* there are a ton of Outlook using lurkers on this list makes it a very practical distinction.
-- Regards,
-rwr
"In the modern world the intelligence of public opinion is the one indispensable condition for social progress."
- Charles W. Eliot (1834 - 1926)
