Bandwidth concerns

[Duncan Wilcox <duncan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Because of the way I read feeds I love full content feeds. Many RSS 
feeds include a complete description or content:encoded or xhtml:body, 
some don't. People who avoid putting full content do so for two 
reasons, reader tracking and bandwidth concerns.

I respect who wants readers to click through to view the full article, 
maybe something can be done for who wants to save on bandwidth, to 
encourage them to put full content in atom feeds.

I wrote something up in http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/EchoFeed 
(for lack of a better place).

Basically I suggest requiring clients to behave somewhat like nntp 
clients, fetching only newer entries, with fallback to "standard" last 
15 items if the server only has a static file. (I guess it needs some 
work for modified entries, but you get the idea)

This would be in addition to ETags and content compression support, of 
course.

Duncan