[Sigia-l] Notification schema?

[Eric Scheid]

On 10/7/03 3:24 AM, "Listera" <listera at rcn.com> wrote:

> it's a conduit for change notification.

Almost. it's a conduit for recent changes ... the difference is that the RSS
feed only contains recent changes as of when you poll it, so unless you have
client side software which is polling on a regular basis, and locally
caching previous polls, then it's quite easy to miss out on some changes
because they've fallen off the bottom of the list.

Such software exists, they're called RSS news readers.

Unfortunately email still has the upper hand even here. It's call the POP3
server: an intermediary store and forward facility. THis means I can
disconnect my laptop from the net, go hiking for a week (or fly business
class from here to timbuktu and back again), and when I return I can
retrieve *all* email that was sent to me in the meantime.

No such facility as yet with RSS :-(

There is one minor advantage of RSS over email though -- if I sign up for
notifications via email I would typically only get the notifications as of
when I sign up, but with RSS from the moment I sign up I can retrieve the
RSS feed which includes some notifications from before I signed up.
e.