mark nottingham

5005

Saturday, 8 September 2007

Web Feeds

Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC.

For many non-traditional (read: non-blog) applications of Atom, I think archived feeds in particular are going to be vital. I’m already using it in some places which should be seeing the light of day before too long; e.g., sending events to HTTP caches — a problem space that people have been noodling on for a very long time indeed.

I’m also hoping that blog aggregators (especially my tool of choice, Vienna) will incorporate support for archived feeds, so that I don’t have to worry about missing entries if I go offline. There are a lot of interesting UI possibilities there.

That’s not to say that paging doesn’t have a place, but I must say that I’m a bit uncomfortable with how often people seem to prefer it. Yes, archiving does cost more, but it gives you better guarantees. Hopefully, this RFC will make people more aware of the trade-offs.

Many thanks to everyone who provided feedback and suggestions; it’s been a long road.