Where Next for RSS?

Tim Bray: Where Next for RSS?

Good article. I have a few NetNewsWire-specific responses, of course.

1. The first issue Tim writes about is what to do when you’re away from your home machine. What about your RSS subscription list when you’re on a kiosk machine somewhere? There are lots of ways to solve this problem, and it’s definitely on my mind.

But first things first—shipping NetNewsWire Pro comes first.

2. Tim asks, “Why do I have to use a non-Web-browser to chase Web content?”

Web browsers aren’t always the most efficient means of viewing data. Check out Watson (or Sherlock) to see what I mean.

I think what we’ll see is more applications using HTML rather than Web browsers including more applications.

3. A few notes about the traffic problem...

NetNewsWire supports ETag and last-modified headers to cut way down on the amount of bandwidth it uses. You can even look at your bandwidth use by choosing Show Bandwidth Stats from the View menu.

The Pro version of NetNewsWire caches feeds on disk, so it uses even less bandwidth.

Tim also writes: “There is going to be an ungodly traffic bulge every morning, and then at half-hour intervals all day.”

About the half-hour intervals—NetNewsWire does not update at :00 and :30 but at intervals since launch time. This staggers the traffic.