Re: Super-simple feed format (was Re: Withdrawn entries)

[Steve Jenson <sjenson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed Oct 29 07:06:36 PST 2003, Seairth Jacobs <seairth@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Except that with the SOAP bindings I would have to reauthenticate for
every entry.


> 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.

Other than my other concern, I think this is a pretty neat idea. 


-steve