Atom feed vs. h-feed size

Indieweb proponent Tantek Çelik wages a war against RSS and Atom feeds, proposing h-feed as the only true alternative.

In feed#Criticism and in his blog he states:

ATOM feeds up to (maybe greater than) 4.5x the size of HTML+microformats

This just is not true. Let's use some real-world numbers from my page. The atom feed contains the last 10 blog posts with full text. Its size is 49465 bytes, 50kiB.

A h-feed parser needs to fetch my blog's index page first, and then the first 10 linked HTML pages to get the same information as the atom feed provides:

SizeFilename
113742total
33479tagebuch.htm
4555219days.htm
15474bdrem.htm
4053claws-libravatar.htm
6806claws-mail-type-search.htm
7387n900-mms.htm
5413pear-php-5.5.htm
8127php-man-viewer.htm
6215postfix-plus-addressing.htm
10937prosody-send-http.htm
11296wandbild.htm

There we have it:

TypeNumber of HTTP requestsSize
Atom feed 1 HTTP request 50 kiB
h-feed 11 HTTP requests 114 kiB

My atom feed is 2.26 times smaller than an h-feed.

Written by Christian Weiske.

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