This conversation took almost an hour, so I split it into two shows:

Part 1 talks mostly about the RFC itself, what it means and why.

Part 2 goes into personal experiences with the RFC and with syndication in general, in particular in the context of web comics. This is part 1.

The why

When serving most RSS/Atom feed readers today, you have to choose: Do you make a complete feed with all the things you ever published, or do you make a shorter feed with just the latest entries?

This is a trade-off with pros and cons, and it seems like a trade-off you have to make, but a solution to let your Atom feed have the cake and eat it too existed already 13 years ago, if only any of our feed readers would adhere to it: RFC 5005, Feed Paging and Archiving

The what

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005 was published in September 2007

The XML namespace for RFC 5005 elements is http://purl.org/syndication/history/1.0, aliased as fh below.

Section 2 defines the complete feed: It is one document (Atom file) that contains the entire set the feed describes. The document is marked with an fh:complete element.

Section 3 defines the paged feed: It is a series of documents connected with Atom link elements with rel set to the link relations first, last, previous or next.

Section 4 defines the archived feed: It has a subscription document that may change at any time, and a series of archive documents that are expected to have stable contents and URIs. The link relations defined are current, prev-archive and next-archive. The semantics are clearer: prev-archive refers to previously published entries, and because the contents are stable you can stop when you see a URI to a document you already have. Archive documents are marked with the fh:archive element.

The who

In this show I’m talking to:

fluffy

Federated social web:

https://queer.party/@fluffy

Writes and makes things in several creative fields:

https://beesbuzz.biz/

Publ is like a static site generator, but dynamic. It produces RFC 5005 archive feeds, of course:

http://publ.beesbuzz.biz/

Thoughts on ephemeral content vs content worth archiving and how they relate to protocols:

https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/5709-Keeping-it-personal

Jamey

Federated social web:

https://toot.cat/@jamey

Blog:

http://minilop.net/

Made a prototype full-history reader that follows RFC 5005 links:

http://reader.minilop.net/

Made a webcomic reader mostly mentioned in Part 2:

https://www.comic-rocket.com/

Made a WordPress plugin implementing RFC 5005:

https://github.com/jameysharp/wp-fullhistory

Made an RFC 5005 archive feed synthesizer for sites with a predictable post frequency and URL structure:

https://github.com/jameysharp/predictable/

Hosted at https://fh.minilop.net/