One way to look at this is to define what parts are local content as opposed to caches of remote, and base the Etag or other hash on that.
I still think we should address caching in Atom 1.0. This would have been part of that. Scaling is an essential thing for syndication, and caching is the best known way to scale.
wunder
--On Thursday, April 07, 2005 02:48:07 PM -0400 Bob Wyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Spaces.msn.com recently announced support for "slash:comments," an element which shows how many comments an RSS item has associated with it. As Dare Obasanjo explains[1]:
"Another cool RSS enhancement is that the number of comments on each post is now provided using the slash:comments elements. Now users of aggregators like RSS Bandit can track the comment counts on various posts on a space. I've been wanting that since last year."
Of course, the side effect of this change is that any aggregator that uses an MD5-like approach to detect changes will now think that an entry has been updated every time a new comment is made. This may or may not be what is desired by consumers of feeds... In any case, there are now millions of blogs whose entries are changed every time anyone comments on them. Should aggregators ignore changes that are limited to the "slash:comments" element? If so, are there other elements that should be ignored? Now, Spaces only publishes RSS feeds... However, if similar atom extensions were to be defined, the problem would appear with Atom feeds as well.
bob wyman
[1] http://spaces.msn.com/members/carnage4life/Blog/cns%211piiOwAp2SJRIfUfD95CnR Lw%21430.entry
-- Walter Underwood Principal Architect Verity Ultraseek
