Long Live Atom!

August 22, 2005 in RSS, Weblogs, aggregation, atom, blog, blogging, blogs, feeds, internet, microformats, microsoft, syndication, technology, weblog

This is just a horribly researched story making the rounds on Atom’s pending death.:

RSS appears to have conquered the last hurdle in becoming the industry syndication standard. Microsoft’s inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn’s coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification.

Yeah. Get real.

  1. Atom is an IETF standard, RSS is not.
  2. Almost all RSS developer are adopting atom.
  3. Most blog publishers have demonstrated their intention to migrate their feeds to Atom 1.0.
  4. Most aggregators have or will have support for Atom 1.0
  5. Just because Microsoft doesn’t support Atom doesn’t mean they won’t support Atom. Heck I imagine they already do support it. (Can someone verify this?)

Update:

Looks like Atom will be included in Microsoft after all:

Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS .9x, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0. As Sean mentioned, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 support will come in a later release.

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2 Replies

  1. Paul Wicks

    August 22, 2005 at 2:23 pm

    What did you think about last Thursday’s announcement, by Jonathan Avidan, about RSS 3.0, which is meant to supplant RSS 0.9 and 2.O?

    Given the current patterns of adoption, is RSS something I can afford to leave out of specifications?

    0K, that may not have been fair.

    Your original intent was to debunk a premature epitaph for Atom. I remember people touting IPX/SPX as TCP/IP’s obvious and inevitable successor, and yet, I believe you just used TCP/IP to get this. An IETF standard is not something we should underestimate. Your position is a wise one.

    But, setting aside for a moment that 3.0 is officially its umpteenth release, what do you think about the future of RSS?

  2. Kevin Burton

    August 22, 2005 at 5:59 pm

    Hey Paul.

    Well I think if anything were to replace RSS it will be Atom. There is just too much industry buy off. One guy (or a small group of guys) working on a followup to RSs isn’t going to go anywhere. Even the RSS 1.0 working group with a dozen guys had problems.

    Atom is going to work just because there is so much momentum behind it.

    RSS will still be used for a long time to come. The data models of Atom and RSS are mostly compatible so there’s no reason you can’t support both.

    The Jakarta Feedparser I wrote does a good job at this without much compromise.

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