> Does this really matter Well, there is a matter of efficiency. Even when the feed reader uses the ETags/last-modified checks - which it should, but may not b

> Does this really matter Well, there is a matter of efficiency. Even when the feed reader uses the ETags/last-modified checks - which it should, but may not be granted practice after providers like Google ditched the technology (as some were apparently flooding them with "are we there yet" requests) - with an average for this year of 200 entries per XML you would be using 1/200th of each per download - and increasing... On the average of 20kb of gzipped material per XML (rough average for this year for that feed) it may not seem much - but if you multiply that for all the feeds users register to, inefficiency starts building a volume... Optimally, I would say, a feed provider should have (1) the "whole collection" XML - "download once to get all the past records in your DB", and (2) a "latest" XML, which should probably better calibrated by time (e.g. all the records of the past 48 hours for a newspaper; all the records for the past month for an every-few-days blog...).