Naive question about implementing RSS

I have a naive question about RSS feeds.

I have a series of timed events which appear on my site and that I make available as an RSS feed for other applications to import.

Who is typically responsible for truncating this feed? Over the next year, I can see my feed having thousands of items. Should the URL mysite.com/rss always return all items? And leave it to the readers to just show the most recent? Or is it more customary that I only return, say, the top 50? Expecting the readers to cache older items? (And, if so, is there a convention for readers to ask the 开发者_运维知识库server for the "next page")?

What is the typical behaviour of something like FriendFeed when it pulls in an RSS stream?

You should return only top few. Readers are supposed to save older items. Readers also usually ask for the feed many times a day, so you'll want to keep its size low to save bandwidth. If someone wants to browse your archives they'll typically do its via our web site. RSS is mostly for syndication of new items.