There has been a lot of discussion lately about RSS bandwidth use. This morning I came across Bob Wyman’s RFC3229 with Feeds. Instead of getting an entire feed, RFC 3229 would extend HTTP to allow sending deltas instead of the whole thing. I’ve got mixed feelings about this idea. I don’t think that standards (like HTTP), should be pressed in stone and never change, but by the same token changes made to it have to be taken very carefully. I haven’t read through everything on the ideas behind RFC 3229, but my gut feeling is that this seems a little on the strong side to solve a bandwidth problem for feeds.
Only time will tell what ideas really catch on to deal with feeds and the load (both system and network) they impose, but I suspect that the ideas most likely to be adopted will be the ones that have the lowest work to benefit ratio (the least amount of work for the most benefit). It may be that there will be two or three likely winning ideas in the end: server side, client side and both. Extending HTTP would fit into the both category and seems the least likely to catch on because both sides would have to implement it in order to see any benefit.