Re: [syndication] Re: Standard RSS location?

[Ian Davis <ian@calaba.com>]

On Tuesday, July 25, 2000, 7:21:41 AM, Stephen wrote:

> For me, what is holding me back from further exploiting RSS/OCS is not
> the difficulty of the standards (they are both very easy to generate),
> nor the difficulty of resource discovery (both userland and xmltree
> are quite workable), but the lack of controls/limits inherent in the
> RSS standard and the RSS readers.

This was the thinking behind the update elements in OCS:
<ocs:updatePeriod>, <ocs:updateFrequency> and <ocs:updateBase>.

These let you specify for each channel's format how often it is
updated, i.e. 5 times a day, twice a week, monthly etc. The aggregator
then knows not to grab the RSS file too often.

I think these give better control than the obscure RSS 0.91 constructs
of skipdays and skiphours which essentially say  'you can hit my RSS
file as many times an hour as you like, but don't touch it during
these periods'

Of course you can't force the aggregators follow the OCS directives,
but you can alleviate some of the symptoms with the use of caching,
and there are ways to configure certain web servers to impose limits
on how frequently a given host can access particular pages.

Ian

-- 
http://InternetAlchemy.org/