Super-simple feed format (was Re: Withdrawn entries)

["Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This one may have already gone by, but...

What if the <feed> format were reduced to a list of URIs pointing to <entry>
resources.  For example:


<feed>
    <!-- feed-level elements: title, link, etc. -->
    <entry uri="http://..."/>
    <entry uri="..."/>
    ...
</feed>

Notes:

1) If a persistent connection is used, the only bandwidth increase is the
HTTP headers in subsequent GETs of the individual entries.
2) Conditional GETs on those URIs could potentially reduce the bandwidth
usage.  Over the course of multiple GETs of the feed, this would especially
be true (since you wouldn't be retrieving the body of each entry every
single time).
3) Removal of an entry can be implicitly handled by a 410 Gone response when
attempting a GET.
4) The number of places that an <entry> document is available is reduced to
one (while the current approach has at least two, depending on the number of
feeds provided).
5) This is something different than RSS-all-over-again.  RSS (to my
knowledge) did not originally conceive of stand-alone entries, hence why the
entries are embedded in the feed.  Atom, in contrast, very much focuses on
entries as their own resources.  Yet we still treat the feed like RSS does.

---
Seairth Jacobs (seairth@xxxxxxxxxxx)
Looking: http://www.seairth.com/blog/65