This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Problem with aggregators?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Dave Winer thinks that publishers have a problem with old/stale feeds - how to do a server based opt out:
A perennial problem with RSS is how does the publisher force an unsubscribe? Shouldn't the publisher have the right to opt-out? Right now there is no mechanism that's broadly supported by aggregators.
There's a simple way to deal with that, covered in the http specs - return a 410 (Gone). BottomFeeder will mark a feed as inactive (i.e., stop checking it), and warn the user that it's been marked Gone by the server if they try to re-activate it. This is not a hard thing...