Tuesday, May 02, 2006

RSS needs conditional GET

This got me thinking: I wish there was a list somewhere of those rss readers that implement http's conditional get. It's really important to the development of RSS for clients to play nice with server's rss feeds. Conditional get is a way for people to play nice by asking servers: "Should I even bother checking this feed?" and servers can say: "Nothing's changed, see you in a bit."

This lowers bandwidth for everyone, and makes it cheaper for people to provide handy dandy services like the Unofficial podcast for This American Life or The unofficial Exploding Dog Feed.

So say you want to be a good community member and use a reader that supports conditional GET. Where do you find out who supports it?