On 18 1 2005 at 7:15 pm -0500, Ross Wm. Rader wrote:
>In the typical dumb implementation that you see most everywhere
>nowadays, yes. It doesn't have to be as heavyweight as you will
>typically find it today - just most designers have been lazy on this
>point thus far...
Are you saying that the RSS mechanism provides a way for the client to
say "only send me stuff that is newer than $DATE"? If so, then it does
sound like an implementation problem that the RSS source could improve.
Otherwise, however, it would be akin to a POP3 server sending summaries
of your most recent 20 e-mail messages every time you logged in,
regardless whether you had seen them before.
Anyway I'll stop speculating on this now and try to learn about RSS soon.
>Someone else was explaining offline that the difference in mechanism is
>rather small, but the difference in *source* is significant. Most people
>get their mail from a relatively local server whereas NNTP and RSS are
>more remote and centralized.
I would argue that it is an academic distinction though. A given group
of data D, going out to persons X, Y and Z, still has to be transmitted
three times (from the source to each of the recipients). With a mailing
list, that happens as an SMTP session between the mail server and the
recipients' MX; with a web page or RSS, it happens as an HTTP session
between the web server and the recipients' machines, etc.
Whether the end user retrieves the e-mail from his intermediary MX/POP3
server or gets it directly from an HTTP source is irrelevant to the fact
that the originating source still has to provide it many times in the
first place.
-ben
-- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca
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