external content [was Re: Bandwidth concerns]

[Evan Martin <martine@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 08:02, Phil Wolff wrote:
> Give the publisher and subscriber the choice of whether to inline content 
> or include by reference. Atom should let the publisher choose whether to 
> include full content and extra payloads, to provide a summary or abstract, 
> or to provide a simple bill of lading. The consumer will have their choice 
> of feeds. This leaves configuration for bandwidth and security in the 
> users' hands.
> 
> The technical challenge is assuring that Atom defines and supports both 
> strategies well.

I agree, and this doesn't seem like it's that hard:
In any <content> bit in the feed, couldn't we allow it to optionally
refer to an external resource instead of inline content?
You'd certainly want to do so in, for example, a photo journal--
retrieving the feed shouldn't be retrieving megabytes of images.  If the
feed format doesn't support it directly, the same effect will be
achieved by HTML links (or img tags) within the content.

Or is the hard part figuring out how that reference should work?

-- 
Evan Martin
martine@xxxxxxxxx
http://neugierig.org