Yes, I think a number of people are working on this.

It's surprisingly tricky, though. The problem is a technical problem -- so skip
this if you're not curious about the under-the-hood workings of aggregators.

In order to make something like a newsrc file work, you need to be able to
identify individual items in a feed. The traditional way to do this is with some
kind of identifier unique to each item.

Some versions of RSS support unique identifiers, but earlier versions don't. And
even though unique identifiers are allowed in newer versions of RSS, not every
feed uses them.

So -- when unique identifiers are not present in a feed, how do you identify an
item? With its link? Its title? A hash of the description? Some combination? Any
solution is bound to be less than perfect.

-Brent


On Monday, December 29, 2003 Allen Hutchison wrote:

>One thing that I would like to see, is a standard way to tell a news
>aggregator what I have already read. I'm thinking of something like a
>newsrc file for usenet, so that I can use different RSS readers on
>different platforms / machines and not have to read the same news over
>and over again. Is anyone working on something like this?
>
>Regards,
>
>Allen