Your comments would be appreciated.

Ultimately, the most efficient syndication systems are going to be push-based. Nonetheless, we can still improve the efficiency of the current old technology “pull” based systems.

bob wyman

Not sure how many aggregators actually poll every hour at the top of the hour, but if there are any, I would encourage them to change that behavior.

First, some assumptions: The aggregate feed has value to people (lots of folks are subscribed to it). Supporting the feed has a significant cost for Microsoft. The current solution (limiting items to 500 characters in the aggregate feed) makes the feed less valuable.

Now, if I were assigned to deal with this problem, here’s what I would propose:

Let’s put together a 1-2 day meeting where MS brings in (i.e. MS pays the expenses) the main aggregator developers, the .TEXT developer, some IIS guys and maybe some of the IE team and lets just hammer out a solution. This is a pretty small community (heck, I can list off the first names of folks and most people reading this will know who I’m talking about: Scott, Greg, Dare, Nick, etc.). RSS/HTTP is a cooperative system. Let’s have a little cooperation.

John,

I do not agree that this is a CPU problem. If it is the server is badly implemented, and the solutions obvious. It is an I/O problem.

Thinking of the top of my head here, but I’d try to explore something like this:

In RSS 2.0 there is the <category> element of <item>, specifically:

“<category> is an optional sub-element of <item>.

It has one optional attribute, domain, a string that identifies a categorization taxonomy.

The value of the element is a forward-slash-separated string that identifies a hierarchic location in the indicated taxonomy. Processors may establish conventions for the interpretation of categories.”

I would propose to define the a magic value: ***RSS2.0+***. The domain attribute of the category element that has as a label that has the magic value has the url where the full content of the parent <item> can be retrieved.

e.g. <category domain=”http://www.example.com/item111″>***RSS2.0+***</category>

Feeds can now be summary feeds, fully backward compatible with all current clients, whereas the adaptations to turn existing clients and servers into incremental full content serving/retrieving systems are managable.

This is just an example. I am sure more experienced minds on this subject will do far better.

<test>

I do not agree that this is a CPU problem. If it is the server is badly implemented, and the solutions obvious. It is an I/O problem.

Thinking of the top of my head here, but I’d try to explore something like this:

In RSS 2.0 there is the

Feeds can now be summary feeds, fully backward compatible with all current clients, whereas the adaptations to turn existing clients and servers into incremental full content serving/retrieving systems are managable.

This is just an example. I am sure more experienced minds on this subject will do far better.