This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Atom - the suckage starts
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.
Ok, here's my take - it makes Atom less than useless as a syndication format. Why? Well, say someone slaps a large piece of binary content in some item in their feed. Now I have to download that content over and over again for the next N days - until the owner of the feed has added enough new items that it ages off. Heck, With RSS enclosures (not that I actually support that yet in BottomFeeder), the aggregator can leave it entirely up to the end user as to whether an enclosure link gets followed or not. With the Atom approach, the feed provider has the option to be completely anti-social (for instance - say I'm traveling and on a slow link - no thanks to your 3 MB binary content on dialup!). Even on a fast link, the binary data is now downloaded and will likely be saved - for no good reason, I might add - in the aggregator's save file. This goes right up there in the hall of shame with my user hostile software post.
Here's a big no thanks - go ruin someone else's day with this idea
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