At 3:43 PM -0500 11/26/03, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
It seems so to me. RSS is strictly a client-initiated pull system. In essence it is a layer of XML metadata describing resources which are primarily transferred via HTTP at the request of the client.Bill Cole wrote:At 5:04 PM +0000 11/26/03, Bruce Stephens wrote:Bill Cole <asrg@billmail.scconsult.com> writes: [...] For the respectable end of the market (the confirmed opt-in, or whatever the current phrase is), I agree completely---there's a space for some use of RSS or something much more appropriate than email. Actually, I suspect HTTP with perhaps some automated browser configuration (to switch on monitoring of the relevant web page) would be easier to get going.
That's a technique with 8 years of hard failure modes behind it. It would be nice if there was a reliable lightweight standard way for web browsers to detect significant changes of HTTP-accessible documents, but there isn't. There's about an 80% solution, and the ways that it does not work are non-trivial to solve.
Does RSS itself present a perfect consent system?
The readers choose what to subscribe to, and when to unsubscribe, with the them having complete control over consent to read or not read certain communications?Yes. The reader's RSS software (usually referred to as an 'aggregator') regularly updates whatever 'feeds' the user subscribes to in order to present whatever might be new in those feeds. The critical mass for RSS has come from weblogging software and sites that provide RSS feeds. The RSS 2.0 spec is at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss and there is a somewhat competitive RDF-based RSS 1.0 that I gather has some serious adherents as well.
If complete consent control can be created in email, with the sender in charge at all times, then that would solve spam, since the sender must actively subscribe to something to receive it. That is one of the motiviations behind pull systems, where a hybrid approach of push and pull is used.I think that pull systems are less 'email' the more purely they follow 'pull' models. The example of the blogging universe predominantly using RSS as the means of content providers getting material to readers rather than the traditional mailing list with all of its clunkiness is a good sign.