Enhancing RSS feeds: eliminating overhead through binary encoding

While RSS feeds increase in popularity as a mean to stay up to date with the most recent changes on a Web site, its XML representation is causing bandwidth related problems. These issues relate to the verbosity and the indivisible nature of the XML language. As such, bandwidth is wasted twofold as: (1) an RSS feed has no compact representation due to the plain text XML representation; and (2) previously received information about the RSS feed is discarded every time the RSS viewer retrieves the feed. Compression (binary encoding) of the XML data becomes relevant to eliminate the overhead. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of the MPEG-7 binary format for metadata to address both overhead issues. We validate its usability in a typical RSS scenario by calculating the byte size reduction and by comparing the processing speed of creating and parsing binary encoded RSS feeds to traditional RSS feeds.