RE: [xml-dev] RSS beyond the Blog: 1992 or 1999? - was Re: [xml-dev] hurry GenX...

["Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

> > - It's not going to scale if I'm the only consumer of a "feed."  A 
> > bank isn't going to appreciate having all their customers ping them 
> > every few minutes to see if anything changed, and Bloglines won't
help 
> > unless there are lots of people subscribing to a given feed.

> automation scripts masquerading as subscription services. If that's
all, then why not just insert a 
> middle-man that can be repeatedly pinged and let the bank push the
data to the middle-man? Oh yeah. 
> That's how POP works. That's what we are trying to get away from.

Actually, that's how the Web works.  There is wide deployment and
adoption of outbound caching proxies at most ISPs and corporations.  And
most large information producer organizations make use of edge caches.
You can argue about "push" vs. "pull", but in reality the distinction is
largely academic.  The only difference is that "push" implies that the
information from the bank will never be stale, but by the time you pull
it from the site and load it in your browser it would be stale anyway --
unless you push all the way to the client, the guarantees of "push" are
a lie, and are almost never actually needed anyway.