[uf-discuss] UID, URL, live microformats (was: Microformat auto-discovery WAS: Plazes & Microformats)

[Scott Reynen]

On Apr 19, 2006, at 11:39 AM, Tantek Çelik wrote:

> 2. Live Microformats.  This is the *really* interesting bit IMHO.   
> As the
> Atom folks have explicitly designed with rel="self", when a chunk  
> of data
> indicates where to get the latest version, you get self-contained
> syndication.  Even "static" copies of the data contain the  
> necessary info to
> *subscribe* to an update of the data.

This is very interesting, and I think it could be a major bridge  
between desktop and web applications.  But I'm a little worried about  
the overhead of loading an entire HTML document just to check if a  
single node within has changed since the last check.  If my address  
book was doing daily update checks of every contact I have, that  
would be a huge waste of bandwidth. And even more so if my calendar  
application starts subscribing to each event individually.  Is there  
some combination of HTTP headers that can be used to check if a  
particular section of a document has changed before loading the whole  
thing?  I'm not sure I understand how If-Range works, but that looks  
close.

Peace,
Scott