Re: Atom feed refresh rates

[Mark Pilgrim <pilgrim@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/5/05, Andy Henderson <Andy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> convincing the WG, I would simply point out that a mechanism widely
> available to, and understood by, feed providers and aggregators cannot do
> harm and has the potential to do a great deal of good.

Not to be flippant, but we have one that's widely available.  It's
called the Expires header.  I spoke with Roy Fielding at Apachecon
2003 and asked him this exact question: "If I set an Expires header on
a feed of now + 3 hours, does that mean that I don't want the client
to fetch the feed again for at least 3 hours?"  And he said yes,
that's exactly what it means.

I sympathize with your dilemma that you have no control over your HTTP
headers, but... wait, no I don't sympathize.  At all.

-- 
Cheers,
-Mark