Imperfect Timing

There is something profoundly wrong with RSS. Namely, an absurdly long string of idiots felt that refreshing an RSS feed on an hourly basis was a good idea. The problem with this fundamentally bad concept is obvious: most feeds don't change inside of an hour, and the less frequently it changes, the more bandwidth you waste looking for it. If you read dailynews.com and it only updates every 24 hours, your aggregator unnecessarily checks it 23 times.

Of course, there's a way around this. You can get creative with how often you refresh your feeds, and both RSS Bandit and Sharpreader support this. Instead of every 60 minutes, you can update every 240. Or 480. Every little bit counts.

But that's not what's wrong with RSS.

HTTP servers which host RSS feeds can support conditional downloads, basically telling an aggregator that the feed hasn't been updated yet without actually giving the full feed to the aggregator and letting it make its own decision. Not enough aggregators support the conditional get feature of HTTP/1.1, which is a shame. An aggregator can simply connect to dailynews.com and ask "Is /dailynews/feed/rss.aspx" newer than 6:15 AM this morning?" and the dailynews.com server can say "No it's not. Leave me alone."

But that's not what's wrong with RSS, either.

What's wrong with RSS is that no aggregator I've seen has given me unlimited control over how often I refresh. And I don't mean unlimited as in I can pick a periodicity of 2 minutes or 57.8 minutes or 999 minutes. I mean completely open-ended control, as in if I can think of it, I can do it. This isn't a flaw in the RSS protocol. It's a limitation of shortsighted computer programmers who think in sums of uniform intervals. If we can put an RC offroader on Mars, we can make an RSS aggregator that understands both "60 minutes" and "once a day".

In short, I should not need a calculator to make my newsreader play well with others. Let's see, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day. So I should enter, uh, 60 times 2 is 120, 6 times 4 is 24, carry the 2, 144 minutes? Rats. I messed up. This is hard work.

Sure, I might be able to eventually figure out how many minutes are in a day, but RSS isn't just for the eggheads. It's used by everybody, from all backgrounds, and that includes the highly educated and far-richer-than-they-probably-should-be morons we all deal with from time to time. You know the type: the ones who never read instructions, can't find the Any key, and don't have the slightest idea that the shiny new dual Athlon PC they use for little more than Word and Outlook is spamming the entire East Coast. These are the people who are using RSS for a distributed denial of service attack, and sure enough, they don't even know it. They're morons, and RSS software developers have an obligation to protect them from themselves. Hell, protect us from them, too.

It should be so easy to set perfectly precise refresh rates in RSS software that it makes falling down look complex by comparison. I demand RSS Bandit and other newsreaders get the message that RSS used carelessly is tantamount to a computer crime and start making this a priority. I should be able to set one feed to "every 60 minutes", another to "every day at 12:05 AM", and another to "once on Tuesdays". If I want to check a feed once a year, I should be able to do that, too. Should I start counting the minutes between now and September 15, 2004? Should I?