Re: Atom feed refresh rates

[Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@xxxxxx>]

On May 5, 2005, at 16:24, Walter Underwood wrote:

> --On May 5, 2005 8:07:15 AM -0500 Mark Pilgrim <pilgrim@xxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote:
> > Not to be flippant, but we have one that's widely available.  It's
> > called the Expires header.
>
> You need the information outside of HTTP. To quote from the RSS spec
> for ttl:
>
>   This makes it possible for RSS sources to be managed by a 
> file-sharing
>   network such as Gnutella.
>
> Caching information is about knowing when your client cache is stale,
> regardless of how you got the feed.

Virtually everyone with IP connectivity can do HTTP, and HTTP has the 
Expires header. If this feature is important to you, why would you 
switch to a transfer protocol that doesn't have the feature? (I am not 
claiming anything about the actual Gnutella features.) To me, the "what 
if the feed is not over HTTP" argumentation seems theoretical 
over-generalization.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@xxxxxx
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/