Bill Kearney

Dumb ideas that sound good

Full content RSS feeds sound like a fine idea. That is, until you dealing with real issues.

My main objection is the waste of resources. It's wasteful to bother pulling down entire chunks of text if they're not going to be read. There are many feeds worth reading. The same cannot be said of the entirety of items from within those feeds.

RSS started out providing a lightweight way for people to see headlines and short excepts of items posted to websites. This provides a tremendously useful way to stay on top of things without wasting a lot of time and resources.

What's going on lately is akin to stuffing everything and the kitchen sink into a feed.