Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?

SlashDot asks Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?

Well, I certainly hope not!

Solutions big and small are in the works. Some of the solutions involve simply doing the small things in the right way, using existing standards. For example, proper use of ETags and If-Modified-Since, as described here, is a big win. I shouldn’t brag too much about that, since Syndic8 doesn’t yet do this. Another big win is to support compression. As I noted a few months ago, the average compressed feed is just 30% the size of the original.

Then we have solutions offered by people like Glenn Fleishman. Glenn saw a problem, and then came up with a server-side solution. It appears that Glenn is essentially simulating a conditional get by returning RSS to certain high-volume tools and sites only when the RSS has changed since the last time it checked.

Finally, there’s more innovation in the works. The feedmesh mailing list has been quite active. Eventually, it should be possible to move from a polling model to a notification model. This won’t happen overnight, but the tracks are being laid now to enable this particular train to run some time in the future.