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Everything will have problems if you start from scratch and have to import millions of items.

But of course there's a standard for paging: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3

Then both ATOM and RSS can leverage HTTP headers. If you include If-Modified-Since into your request the server can decide to only returns items that are newer.

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That's fantastic. Anyone developing ATOM/RSS, please use this mechanism.

(I'm looking at you, podcast with over 100 episodes.)

The problem is that support for this is rare. I know that Podcast Addict supports it but it is rare in podcatchers and even more rare in feed readers.

But I definitely agree that it should be a standard feature!

> Then both ATOM and RSS can leverage HTTP headers. If you include If-Modified-Since into your request the server can decide to only returns items that are newer.

That might work ... most of the time. But its a really ugly layer violation not to mention incompatible with any kind of caching proxy. Don't do this, please.

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