Re: Bandwidth concerns

[Nelson Minar <nelson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>People who avoid putting full content do so for two reasons, reader
>tracking and bandwidth concerns.

I have a third reason not to give full feeds - visual design. I put a
lot of effort into making my blog pretty. And some of the markup I use
in my feed references a stylesheet that may not be available to the
aggregator and, even if it were, may not work in the aggregator's context.

I've thought about working on some sort of Atom extension that allows
full visual markup to be communicated through to the aggregator. But
it's complicated and, in the complete case, impossible.

>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.

This sounds way too stateful and complex. It's a clever idea, but it
would require a lot of innovation to get right. I don't think
Pie/nEcho/Atom is the place to do that.