{"id":51,"date":"2005-07-18T23:48:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-19T13:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=11"},"modified":"2005-07-18T23:48:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-19T13:48:00","slug":"atom-vs-rss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/2005\/07\/18\/atom-vs-rss\/","title":{"rendered":"Atom vs RSS"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems to have been a long time coming, but Atom has finally reached 1.0 status<\/a> as an IETF standard<\/a>. Lots of smart people seem to have worked hard to produce a high-quality result. Judging by this comparison of features<\/a>, it certainly seems better than RSS 2.0.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I don’t see it gaining much traction any time soon.<\/p>\n

The problem is that Atom doesn’t really solve any problems for most people. As a syndication format, Atom solves some problems to do with the identity of posts and optional fields. This is definitely A Good Thing. As I said, Atom is better than RSS. The problem, though, is that RSS is good enough<\/i>. There isn’t see much incentive for anyone to change. This is not because a lot of infrastructure needs to be ripped-out: on the contrary, aggregator vendors will, I’m sure, quickly add Atom 1.0 support to their products and many CMS<\/a> vendors will provide Atom feed capabilities. Anyone who then wants Atom can use it. I don’t see that happening much because no-one (feed consumers or producers) really gain much  Its like IMAP<\/a> vs POP3<\/a>. IMAP is widely supported, has some great features, and is certainly technically superior; but everyone gets by with POP3 because it is good enough<\/i>.<\/p>\n

As a publishing protocol, Atom is infinitely better than the alternative from the RSS world: the MetaWeblog API<\/a>. Anyone who has ever had to write code to generate conformant MetaWeblog messages (and I have) knows that the spec is a joke: some things just plain can’t be done, and everything else can be done in multiple ways. But no-one except a small number of developers writing blogging clients really care. Again,  MetaWeblog is good enough because its shortcomings are not a problem for most people.<\/p>\n

Its a shame. As a techie I want the best solution to succeed. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that is going to happen in this case.<\/p>\n

The lesson? Go read the cathedral and the bazaar<\/a> again. Build something that does the job; release early and often; allow users to extend<\/a> what you’ve built.<\/p>\n

None of this is new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems to have been a long time coming, but Atom has finally reached 1.0 status as an IETF standard. Lots of smart people seem to have worked hard to produce a high-quality result. Judging by this comparison of features, it certainly seems better than RSS 2.0. Unfortunately, I don’t see it gaining much traction … Continue reading “Atom vs RSS”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}