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:
| Size | Filename |
|---|---|
| 113742 | total |
| 33479 | tagebuch.htm |
| 4555 | 219days.htm |
| 15474 | bdrem.htm |
| 4053 | claws-libravatar.htm |
| 6806 | claws-mail-type-search.htm |
| 7387 | n900-mms.htm |
| 5413 | pear-php-5.5.htm |
| 8127 | php-man-viewer.htm |
| 6215 | postfix-plus-addressing.htm |
| 10937 | prosody-send-http.htm |
| 11296 | wandbild.htm |
There we have it:
| Type | Number of HTTP requests | Size |
|---|---|---|
| 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.