Push-Me-Pull-You (Was NNTP)

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

Here's another take. As part of work, I'm signed up to get Moreover's
"Vertical Portal" headlines via daily email. This has the advantage to
me that I can go back over a week or two and be sure that I've got every
item that they've syndicated. One of the issues I have with web based
and http-pull RSS is that if you don't look, you don't receive the
items. For low volatility feeds, where the lifetime of an item in the
feed is much more than the most infrequent check I do, This isn't really
a problem.  But some of the synthetic feeds are so busy that if I fail
to collect the new XML file for say 15 hours, items have dropped off the
bottom of the list.

It's not quite the same and the words are not quite right, but this is a
little like the old issues of Push and Pull. In reality, Push was
actually just periodic Pull but the effect was like a true Pull system.

The advantage here of using an SMTP or NNTP transport is the store and
forward. I can collect the new items when I'm ready, but I get all of
them because the store and forward system in the middle has batched them
up.

There is a view that when we all have always-on internet access and can
afford to give up processor cycles to our own personal store and forward
system, this issue goes away. But in the real world of dial up modems,
hotel rooms and ADSL/Cable providers that disallow servers we're not
going to get there for some time to come. And not everyone can dedicate
a PC Server to collect the news for them, while they work somewhere
else. 

There are people working now on XML over SMTP and discussion here about
RSS over NNTP. But ISTM that a whole new set of extensions to Standards
would be needed to define the envelopes, along with some implementations
to gateway the feeds to the new distribution method. There is an
alternative here that the feed originators could use the new comms
method, but we're still struggling to get everyone to create an RSS file
without adding this burden as well. 

-- 
Julian Bond eMail: julian@netmarketseurope.com
HomeURL: http://www.shockwav.demon.co.uk/ 
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ICQ:33679668 tag:So many words, so little time