Jay Allen recently posted an article* on RSS and bandwidth which was an extension of Eric Meyer's comment on RSS during an article on switching to Wordpress.
Let me first say that I think Eric can be quite the snob at times (his recent "blogs are broken!" decree comes to mind) and so I take his "bandwidth does still matter!" comment with a grain of salt. All the same, he's brilliant so it doesn't bother me all that much. Bandwidth is not unlimited but for someone like Eric, I think that the difference between having a full post feed (lets say the last 10 posts) and excerpts makes little difference. Jay and Eric spend a lot of time trying to figure out just what takes up more bandwidth; a full trip to the site or downloading the full (possibly compressed) rss feed. My question (at the risk of sounding a little snobbish) is more about RSS feeds themselves. Why should we be forced to trade design for simplicity?
All of our feeds, full post or not, are BORING at the moment. How about a system (hell, even a new three-letter-acronym if you really want to - SSD, Simple Syndication and Display, sounds good to me) with a consistant feed format (I'm no expert on .91, 1, 2 or Atom...) and design package. You'd download the design package which is a little like an MT template via this new SSD client and it would be stored for future use. Every day or so your client would use a conditional GET to check for a new design - this can also be updated manually. You can set the timing for feed retreival and since it uses conditional GET requests (and perhaps even compression), no extra bandwidth is wasted. Don't have the time to make a design template? Build INTERESTING default designs in to the client. Have the choice to display a default design or the custom design.

Anyway, I'm still using full posts. Visit or don't visit, I haven't used up enough of my bandwidth this month.
I'm back from NYC now. More on that eventually, I promise. Also, MT3 beta3 brings a new individual entry template and that means I've gotta update the MT Comment Template post - I'll get to that later tonight.

* I mentioned to myself while typing this that people who actually have real visitors to their site are posting articles while people like myself are still posting posts. Oh well.