Several proposals have been submitted to ease the pain of RSS on webmasters. Many of these are described in detail in the RSS Feed State HOWTO [17]; exam- ples include avoiding transmission of the feed content if it hasn’t changed since the client’s last request, gzip compression of feed data, and clever ways to shape the timetable by which clients may poll the RSS feed. Unfortunately, because the schedule of micronews is essentially unpredictable, it is fundamentally impossible for clients to know when polling is necessary. Werner Vogels puts it succinctly: Uncontrolled Polling of RSS Resources Does Not Scale [24]
