[Sigia-l] Notification schema?

[Eric Scheid]

On 7/11/03 8:53 AM, "Listera" <listera at rcn.com> wrote:

>> No such facility as yet with RSS :-(
> 
> It's utterly and trivially easy to do that, with a "Delete messages older
> than [  ] hours" type of a pref setting.

If the message doesn't exist, it can't be [not] deleted.

Show me how utterly and trivially easy it is to do that, using these RSS
feeds as examples:

    http://www.peterme.com/index.rdf
    http://webword.com/index.xml
    http://www.iaslash.org/module.php?mod=node&op=feed

These are just a few of the RSS feeds I subscribe to. They all show recent
updates, but only back so far, and no further. I could tell my RSS reader to
"delete messages older than 90 days", but that won't make the messages from
30 days ago magically appear if I never retrieved them in the first place.

It's an architectural limitation of the RSS concept. There is no
intermediary aggregator in the concept, no analog to the POP3 mail server.
These are not insurmountable challenges though: an intermediary aggregator
could be set up (after someone actually gets around to writing one), to
which you would then subscribe to for your feeds, instead of the original
source; or alternatively you could try re-programming the source generators
to respond to a parametised URL, such that you could specify a "since when"
parameter ... but you can only do that with RSS sources under your control.

e.