Chad Dickerson, the CTO of Infoworld: Several months ago, I spoke to a Web architect at a large media site and asked why his site didnât support RSS. He raised the concern that thousands (or even millions) of dumb clients could wreak havoc on a popular Web site. [cut] As the popularity of RSS feeds at InfoWorld started to surge, I began to notice that most of the RSS clients out there requested and downloaded our feeds regardless of whether the feeds themselves had changed. At the time, we hadnât quite reached the RSS tipping point, so I filed these thoughts away for later -- but âlaterâ came sooner than I thought.
Dare: At this point I'd like to note that HTTP provides two mechanisms for web servers to tell clients if a network resource has changed or not. The basics of this mechanism is explained in the blog post HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers which provides a way to prevent clients such as news readers from repeatedly downloading a Web document if it hasn't been updated. At this point I'd like to point out that at the current time, the InfoWorld RSS feed supports neither.
Randy: Dare shows that Chad is a not very proactive complainer. This is also a great read for anybody looking to cut down on their RSS bandwidth.
The fact that Chad wrote the article w/ a concern of bandwidth, was shown by many that he could easily fix and that he never took the time to fix...
Translates to...
There never was a problem. He was just blowing his whistle.
Randy