Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The Genius Behind RSS

Was working on a site today for an i2x client, and had this thought about RSS:

The genius behind RSS is that all the work of dealing with RSS happens on the client side. This means that writing a client is relatively hard, while developing a new feed is easy. This was a brilliant move, because you want a nice selection of RSS readers, but you want gobs and gobs of feeds for them to consume.

The tricky part of a protocol has to go somewhere - and in the case of RSS - they put it exactly where it belongs.

Just something to think about when you're designing a protocol of some sort - make sure you decide who's doing the heavy lifting, and choose that party carefully.

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