Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the the-unseen-battle? dept.
heeeraldo writes "Is there another format war on the horizon? This wiki compares the two, and finds that even though RSS has far greater deployment (and mindshare), Atom 1.0 solves a lot of the problems associated with it."
198 comments
Can't tell the difference
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Most users cant tell the difference, even if they cared to. So, as a conclusion: Noone cares.
So all feeds supported in Longhorn will be: RSS 0.9x RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0 ATOM 0.3 ATOM 1.0
Re:No question
by
Isofarro
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· Score: 2, Informative
Not exactly true. Microsoft have confirmed that their Longhorn RSS plans does include handling Atom. They have thrown their weight behind RSS as in syndication, not RSS as the file format.
Microsoft and RSS. Are they stupid? I dont want RSS integrated with the operating system in any way. In fact, I wish RSS readers were harder to install. Now we'll have to put up with streaming ads docked into longhorn's side bar. But wait until Microsoft "extends" the capability. Why not have it send back "annymous usage data" on every link clicked. Then instead of going to a news site to read my news, the news I read is targeted to me through a third party, along with ways to better my credit, get my degree online and grow my penis 3" in 20 days... Naturally! Destroy a simple idea that works well, and turn it into a vital system process that'll take up 70Mb of physical memory to use. Why can't we have a technology that just works. Stop "improving" everything, so the average schmuk who doesn't know or care what RSS is will think he needs it, and shell out a few bucks for an upgrade on his OS. Open up the flood gates for a massive wave of usless feeds. I cant wait to see these... "Amazing things dogs do Daily", "Daily Coffee Recipies", "News about people with fishtank webcams", "The William Shatner Diaries" It's like giving a monkey a gun.
What is this stuff *for* anyway?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I really don't get what this stuff is for. So you can see news articles in one place? Big deal... Handy, but there's far more buzz than that merits. So what's an example of something really cool that wouldn't have been possible without this earth shatteringly brilliant technology?
Re:What is this stuff *for* anyway?
by
turnstyle
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
The widespread availability of "machine readable" syndicated feeds was very useful for my new app Bitty.
What I find interesting is the ease with which you can put feeds to other purposes -- for example, some people use Bitty to "broadcast" their feeds to other sites...
Re:What is this stuff *for* anyway?
by
Momoru
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· Score: 1
Well it's not being able to see news articles in one place thats the big deal. If you are someone that has a regular group of web sites you check every day, say Slashdot, Register, MSDN blogs, your ex-girlfriend's blog etc... you don't have to manually visit every site to see if content has been updated and if it interests you. You just glance at some feeds real quick to see if interesting content has been updated.
Re:What is this stuff *for* anyway?
by
shokk
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Because browsing around hundreds of web sites for news is a pain in the ass. Let the information flow to YOU. It's all about structuring the info so you can do more with it beyond simple screen scraping.
I'm not talking about just Dilbert comics or other entertainment outlets. Imagine notification of software updates. Email is lousy for this sort of thing when you get hundreds of emails per day. It's not searchable and it sits in your own account. Another benefit of RSS is control over the lists. You ever get an email from someone you know that didn't really come from someone you know, yet had a nice virus payload attached? This doesn't do that. Any info that comes from the RSS channel is something YOU have subscribed to and unsubscribing is dead easy.
Further, with an RSS Reader I use called Feed On Feeds, you can access its mySQL backend from any other software to do what you want with the information streams. There are many other readers that use this same philosophy. If you MUST have mailing lists, well, then mail out from there; not all of these sites have mailing lists and this would make a great way to present it in that format. You can reblog select posts, or a channel combining a number of other channels.
-- "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Re:What is this stuff *for* anyway?
by
meknapp
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· Score: 1
Bungie posts all kinds of statistics for Halo 2 games played over Xbox Live on their website. You can then subscribe to an RSS feed for your own games.
I saw a pretty cool app that used this feed as in essence the "delta changes" to the database and it would keep a local database of your game statistics (and others) up to date using RSS. Then you could run all kinds of custom reports not available on bungie.net.
-- "Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." -- Benjamin Franklin
Re:What is this stuff *for* anyway?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Imagine notification of software updates.
Good example - two of the feeds I'm subscribed to are the Gnome FTP server (notifying of anything new uploaded), and the kernel site.
-- "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I would consider...
by
zegebbers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This isn't trolling, just confusion. I would consider myself to be relatively informed about tech matters, however there is very little info about atom and it is hard to google for. Would it be possible to have a tiny summary as to what atom is ?
Re:I would consider...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3, Funny
Here you go(it's tiny, you might have to squint):
Re:I would consider...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Just read the wiki link that's already been provided.
Re:I would consider...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Who is this willy, the wiki vandal, and why hasn't he been blown of the face of this planet?
(and could some one undo his changes?)
Re:I would consider...
by
superskippy
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· Score: 5, Informative
RSS and Atom are standardised ways of having a live list of stories appear from say a newssite (like this one) in various programs. Firefox calls these live bookmarks. I came here using firefox by clicking on my toolbar, seeing all of the new stories, and deciding I was interested in this one. You can also use it for desktop "news ticker" applets.
The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people. As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2, but some people argue 2 is worse than 1:(. All of these standard's owners have been accused of not taking on board comments from the wider community.
Atom is another protocol for doing the same thing. Technical issues aside, it gets my vote because they didn't decide to call it RSS 3. Or RSS 10.
The claim that there are multiple incompatible versions of RSS is used as a way to try to make RSS look bad. I've written code to interpret an RSS feed, and I don't have any switching based on the version of RSS it is... I do have to figure out what to use as a unique identifier based on some heuristics, but that's not because there's multiple versions, it's because the spec intentionally allows you to include a minimum number of tags.
If you don't like something about a protocol, is the correct thing to do to revise the protocol? I think so... many of the Internet protocols we use have changed over the years, some of them in incompatible ways. Doesn't mean we have to toss them and make new ones.
The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people.
The most complete history I've seen of the many different RSS variants can be found in Mark Pilgrim's essay, The myth of RSS compatibility. As of early 2004, there were (by Mark's count) nine incompatible document formats all calling themselves "RSS" of one version or another.
It's easy to see why developing a robust feed parser is a real challenge (albeit a necessary one, to hide the current standards chaos from users).
Re:I would consider...
by
Linus+Torvaalds
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· Score: 3, Informative
The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people.
As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2
No. The short version is that somebody at Netscape invented 0.9something based on RDF. The public release (another 0.9something) was rushed for my.netscape.com and wasn't based on RDF. Then Netscape abandoned the format, and Dave Winer republished the 0.9something specification. He made a couple more basic changes, all 0.9somethings. Then somebody else published a 1.0 that was again based on RDF. Dave threw a hissy fit, accusing them of stealing "his" RSS, and renamed 0.9something as 2.0.
It's more or less true that 1.0 was released as a fait accompli, however unintentional. However the real thorn stopping people from working together is, and always has been, Dave Winer. The guy's an asshole.
Re:I would consider...
by
WWWWolf
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, these are are XML syndication formats. In other words, they move headlines and article summaries from server to user in machine-parseable format.
There's RSS, which is the reigning de facto standard, but it also is regrettably very, very liberally specified, and even less frequently heeded. Everyone's extending it to their own heart's content more or less competently. There are lots of different variations. Not easy to implement, not easy to learn.
Atom is an attempt to make a real standard-like standard out of RSS's best features and some of its own. It tastes more commitee-like, is probably initially less funny to implement on the server end (if you're lazy), but it is very nicely standardised and as a result it's far easier to write a parser for it, too, so client support is coming fast. And, it's more than just a syndication format: There's API for publishing and the atom format can, as such, also be used as a standardised weblog backup/storage format.
Re:I would consider...
by
laffer1
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This is very interesting because I never realized the parallels between RSS and HTML standards. Consider all the changes between the various HTML standards. Considering this is slashdot, I won't go into extreme detail. A little reading on w3.org, etc. will clarify for those that do no know.
The w3 refactored HTML 4.01 into XHTML 1.0 using XML instead of SGML. This is similar to the RDF to standard XML change in RSS. Then, the w3 modularized XHTML 1.0 Strict into XHTML 1.1, similar to the back and forth element changes between the.9x versions of RSS. Next, the w3 released XTHML 2.0 which is not HTML any longer. They try yet again to get rid of the image tag, and it hasn't worked before why now? You can't have web pages without images, and browsers don't support XHTML 2 yet. This change is like the RSS 1.0 spec in RDF.
Personally, I'd like to see an RDF feed because the idea of RDF is neat. I currently use the RSS 2 feed because I figured it was popular, and out of confusion didn't know what else to do. I may look at atom. I need this for open source blogging software i'm writing.
The various streams of RSS feeds in different formats make writing an RSS feed parser like a browser. You have to deal with a ton of different formats. Its the authors fault and individuals faults for wanting a popular standard enhanced for their special cases. I still know people that author in HTML 2.0 or that ISO version of HTML.
Lastly, while the short answer is that we don't have compatible standards, I'd like to point out its XML. Maybe the standards people could create some XSLT documents to convert their bastardized RSS formats into bastardized XHTML/HTML format. 2 bastards are better than one.:)
Re:I would consider...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
...jackass
Re:I would consider...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Nobody was talkin bout your member.
Re:I would consider...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people. As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2, but some people argue 2 is worse than 1:(. All of these standard's owners have been accused of not taking on board comments from the wider community.
One issue with RSS is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people. First was RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it RSS 2, but some people argue RSS 2 is worse than RSS 1. All of these standard's owners have been accused of not taking on board comments from the wider community.
Re:I would consider...
by
poopdeville
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· Score: 1
The rest of your post here actually sounds like you have a brain, but that bit I quoted has to be the most absurdly ignorant statement I've seen all day.
-- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
XHTML 2 removes the img tag and uses an attribute on other tags to include images. Thats why I said that. Pages would still be usable, but most websites I use would be pointless without images.
I see no concrete illustration about why Atom is superior to RSS. Why would is necessarily "win".
>
Re:Where's the comparison?
by
Isofarro
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· Score: 4, Informative
Atom cleanly specifies how to incorporate plain text, html and XHTML content in an entry. Covering how text and html needs to be escaped, etc.
RSS2.0 had a problem last year where Reuters suffered a public embarrassment adopting the format. They followed the specification correctly, and it resulted in silent data loss - their stock identifiers were in angled brackets and got treated as an HTML tag by news aggregators.
It wasn't rocket science, but this simple thing turned out to be impossible to do with RSS2.0 - it was tried many times. After the funky feed debacle, the community realised that a separate format independent of RSS2.0 was the only way to fix the underlying problem.
The proponents of RSS2.0 tried to fix the silent data loss, and ended up breaking backwards compatibility with RSS0.92 - something they weren't prepared to do before Atom.
Re:We use it!
by
TheRaven64
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Slashdot has the most broken RSS feed ever invented. You get banned for 72 hours if you access it more than once every 30 minutes. Not really a problem, except that Slashcode is braindead at identifying individuals. Two computers behind a NAT are treated as the same person, for example. Worse, my ISP uses a transparent proxy for everyone in my city (most people here with broadband use my ISP, since their cable service is a lot cheaper than competing ADSL suppliers). Does Slashdot recognise this? No, they block the transparent proxy whenever more than one person using it accesses the site within a 30 minute period. Clever, huh? The result is that the Slashdot feed is always blocked for me at home.
"Two computers behind a NAT are treated as the same person"
"They block the transparent proxy"
The reason for this is because about the only thing you can't forge is your apparent, from the Slashdot server's perspective, WAN IP address. Your real WAN or LAN IP is passed in an easy to manipulate X_FORWARDED_FOR or HTTP_VIA HTTP header (both non-standard HTTP/1.1).
Of course, If you add a fake IP address to this header then a legitimate user-agent or proxy should still append you're remote IP. Although, I don't think there is a standard as to the order or requirement to do so.
If this is the case, to protect the feed from abuse by IP access lists would mean verifying the integrity of every proxy on route (how it operates, if it is shared and secure from meddling).
Other than providing you with some kind of cookie to log you in (which most news readers don't support) theres not much/. can do.
Ok I did take a look at the feed and if I see it correctly the feed defines a cache time of 30 minutes. So if your proxy requests the document more than once in 30 minutes it's a broken proxy.
Either that article is heavily biased or ATOM 1.0 completely demolishes everything that RSS is/was/used to be. I wish that the article would have at least showed one or two points where RSS is better, but it appears that there isn't any such points.
Well, of course! Click on the Front Page link, and Voila! You are on the Atom development wiki. This is hardly an unbiased discussion.
Re:whoa nelly
by
axxackall
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work.
This is the point: Atom is just a fork. RSS is a real concept. Forks come and go, a concept stands.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't understand why anyone uses OS X, Linux with KDE or Gnome, or Windows XP nowadays. Those are just forks of the original GUI concept. Now the Xerox Alto computer, that was a concept and its the only thing I trust to last.
Re:whoa nelly
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Atom is just a fork. RSS is a real concept.
They are both file formats. Neither are concepts. Atom isn't a type of RSS, it's just that RSS got to the buzzword finishing line before Atom. Atom isn't a fork, it's a replacement.
Atom was created to address the deficiencies in RSS. Unsurprisingly, it's better than RSS. If it wasn't, then there wouldn't have been much point in creating it, would there?
Dave Winer had a good idea; but it wasn't implemented with the benefit of hindsight via experience. Atom rights many of the most egregious wrongs of RSS and does it in a straightforward manner that is understandable and better yet, more likely to be implemented in consistent fashion by others, unlike how RSS "standard" use is often bastardised.
Getting back to your point - the "concept" was good but insufficient. The "fork" is a better mousetrap and should stand.
Unfortunately, I foresee a long period where both are used.
Either that article is heavily biased or ATOM 1.0 completely demolishes everything that RSS is/was/used to be.
I'm sure it could be argued OGG Vorbis completely demolishes everything that MP3 is/was/used to be also, but does it matter? Like MP3, RSS has already won the mindshare war. Those three letters are already stuck in the minds of bloggers as the very definition of How To Syndicate Content.
Back to the VHS Vs. Betamax days eh? If there's one thing that war proved, it's that technical sophistication is irrelevant: mindshare is what matters. If nobody's using it, it doesn't matter if it has the prettiest widgets.
That said, one nice thing about this format war is that there doesn't have to be a loser. It's fairly easy to handle multiple formats in software (note the number of redundant music formats), unlike hardware which is usually impossible. If the process of reading RSS tags or Atom tags is made transparent to the user, who cares who wins?
Re:Once again
by
$RANDOMLUSER
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The difference, in this case, is that the decision to use RSS or Atom will be made by the website operators, not the end consumers. The consumers will use what the webmasters use. And I'm thinking that the webmasters will be attracted to the features rather than the ubiquity of a particular format.
-- No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
- Winston Churchill
If this was a VHS versus Betamax style debate than one standard would be proprietary and carry heavy licensing fees. That, and the shorter recording times, are the reasons why Beta lost out to VHS. This issue is simply a question of whether or not a derivative standard improves on, and thus should replace, a previous standard.
> it's that technical sophistication is irrelevant: mindshare is what matters
You typed `mindshare` when you meant to type `sales`. Mindshare is a metric used to work out what a company was worth during the amusing blip that was the "dot-com boom". You don't need to use the word any more - it's lost any credibility it ever had.
It's fairly easy to handle multiple formats in software
How true...I never run into problems trying to get CSS1 and CSS2 to work properly across IE/Safari/Firefox/Konqueror/etc. Granted, some of them implement the standard improperly (*cough...IE..*), but this is what happens when multiple standards exist for the same purpose. I for one don't like re-creating my work for RSS 0.7/1.0/Atom/whatever...that's 3x the work I have to do. And then we'll get RSS 10.0...
Please tell me you didn't really mean to imply that all technical sophistication has nothing to do with user functionality and ergonomics;).
Certainly not.:-)
But then (at least to my mind), "pretty widgets" doesn't imply user functionality and ergonomics, either.
I think we agree: a product with great technical sophistication can be killed by a bad user interface (which is also technical to some extent), but lack of effective marketing to bring the product to peoples' attention can make both irrelevant.
-- Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Re:Once again
by
jez9999
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· Score: 3, Informative
IE supports enough PNG functionality to be able to do anything you could do with JPEG, and more. It just can't do proper transparency, which JPEGs don't support either.
That's a completely back asswards way of looking at it. Website opperators are forced to cater to broken IE implementations not because they are attracted to its features, but because that's what 80% of their visitors are using. And no, if you're a commercial website you can't just say "Screw 'em if they're not smart enough to use Firefox."
So back to the original point, if no one is using Atom, why would website operators publish in Atom? Though I do agree with the point that's been made that it's easy enough to publish both.
Re:Once again
by
InvalidError
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· Score: 2, Informative
I think the fact that JPEG (1985) has been around for many more years than PNG (1995) and the fact that Unisys was collecting LZW (used by PNG) licenses from 1995 to 1999 also have something to do about that.
In any case, the majority of sites I visit still use GIFs (1987) for generic elements, like the rounded end on separators and story icons here.
AFAIK, PNG was never aimed at replacing JPEG... its main aim was to provide a better, Compuserve-free GIF alternative.
It was actually GIF that used the LZW algorithm - PNG is favored by webmasters exactly because it's unencumbered by patent issues.
-- we discovered a new way to think.
Re:Once again
by
damiangerous
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· Score: 2, Informative
the fact that Unisys was collecting LZW (used by PNG) licenses from 1995 to 1999 also have something to do about that.
No, LZW was a major motivator for creating PNG, not a mark against it. PNG is LZW free. Also it isn't limited to 256 colors like GIF.
AFAIK, PNG was never aimed at replacing JPEG... its main aim was to provide a better, Compuserve-free GIF alternative.
You're right about that though, if not for the right reasons. PNG wasn't really designed to have anything to do with JPEG, they mostly serve different purposes. With the expiration of the LZW patent it's not really a "GIF replacement" anymore, because there's no longer any reason not to use GIF if it suits your needs. PNG has become simply another format with its own benefits (and a couple small drawbacks).
Doh! (I should avoid speed-reading so many things at once. BTW, it seems IBM also has a LZW patent due to expire next year.)
In any case, GIF is still the most common generic site image format on the sites I visit so I do not quite see this alledged favourism in action. Maybe there is a study somewhere with actual online image format statistics that would say otherwise.
And with GIF's liberation (or even throughout the Unisys/Compuserve episode), most site designers/maintainers simply applied the good old "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
[...] if not for the right reasons. [...] With the expiration of the LZW patent it's not really a "GIF replacement" anymore
Looks like you did not notice the past tense in "its main aim was to provide a better, Compuserve-free GIF alternative"... back when PNG first came along, this _was_ one of the reasons, even if it no longer is _now_.
If the process of reading RSS tags or Atom tags is made transparent to the user, who cares who wins?
That's right - if they do the same thing noone cares.
I suspect somebody clever will come up with a killer app that will require a feature that either one or the other has that we're not noticing right now, and then noone will remember the other format. As it should be.
-- My God, it's Full of Source! OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The choice is left to the web site developer's preference because, generally, modern RSS/Atom aggregators can support both formats. The end user doesn't really need to know or care what format the information is provided in if they can handle both.
-- I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
I did indeed notice it. That would be why my first sentence after your quote was, "You're right about this though". I added the "for the wrong reasons" because "Compuserve-free" is not entirely accurate. Unisys was the patent holder on LZW, not CompuServe. CS licensed it from Unisys to make it available for their users in the GIF89 format, which is why it became associated with CompuServe but they weren't technically the "bad guys' here. CS didn't control LZW and couldn't have given it away if they wanted to. Licensing it was their only option, especially with how entrenched GIF was.
So bascically, the part after the first quote was correcting your statement about LZW, and the part after the second was supporting and expanding on your statement about what PNG was and is.
Oh, completely agreed. I was designing a small website once, wanted to use a transparent PNG (with a soft fade from opaque to transparent). Worked great in firefox, but in IE, the color of the transparent part of the PNG didn't match the color of the background of the website. WTF? It's 100% transparent, how can it be a different color than what's behind it? Stupid IE. Ended up using a GIF instead.
format war?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Doesn't it depend on what IE7 will support?
I mean there are still 60% who still use that incompatible Browser because they believe that it is the internet and the Modem is a special powercord.
It's not pretty folks
by
revery
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· Score: 3, Funny
Defend yourself RSS...
Smack! Kapow!
At least put your hands in front of your face.
Whack! Bam!
Get up off the mat, RSS!!! Get up!!
I can't watch anymore...
Re:It's not pretty folks
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Smack! Kapow! Whack! Bam!
So it's like an episode of Batman:-)
Re:It's not pretty folks
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Thank you for your comment sir, but RSS is being put straight into browsers (IE 7, Opera 8.02 and some earlier, and all Safari versions after Tiger came out (2.0 412.2 at the minute).
Before this thread I as a casual user was hitherto unaware of ATOM.
You are aware, of course, that all of those readers already support Atom, right...
Atom's More Than A Syndication Format
by
arthurs_sidekick
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· Score: 5, Informative
Atom is both a syndication format and an API for creation, updating, and deletion of content. It's already in widespread use by Blogger.
What's been (all but) finalized is the syndication format (and rules for extending it). This allows the working group to firm up the details of the publishing API, which, for my money, is the real payoff with Atom.
A pretty good overview of the history of RSS and the motivations behind Atom is here.
-- "Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Which one is growing?
by
DanielMarkham
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While the article was a nice feature comparison of the two, it really didn't get into the "format war" question at the top of the page here.
Besides industry support, my only question would be "which one is growing?" Which of these formats is expected to get a new version number sometime soon?
If you ask me, that is why Microsoft is talking about adding "extensions" to RSS -- by growing and adapting the standard, it gets more bells and whistles, more application support, and more momentum in the development community.
Which of these formats is expected to get a new version number sometime soon?
Atom 1.0 will be ratified as an IETF standard any day now. RSS is essentially a dead format, the RSS 2.0 specification states that there will be no new versions, only extensions.
My RSS reader (Safari built-in) has been banned for 72 frigging days, never mind 72 hours. Anybody at/. there?
Re:As If I Cared
by
TheRaven64
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Are you behind a NAT or a transparent proxy (provided by your ISP)? If so, then you are likely, like me, never to be unbanned from the Slashdot RSS feed because it can't tell the difference between you and other people with the same IP.
Thanks for that. I thought I must have done something to upset Slashdot. Glad I'm not the only one.
Re:Firefox support?
by
superskippy
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· Score: 3, Informative
Already done- Firefox supports lots of different sorts of RSS and Atom already.
Re:Firefox support?
by
arthurs_sidekick
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· Score: 3, Informative
You're soaking in it.
(Firefox has supported Atom since at least the first full release of the RSS support; the Sage plugin also supports Atom).
Kids, Atom's not new. It's been developed by lots of smart folks.
-- "Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Who cares?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
They're both unencumbered and available to the public (AFAIK), so client software can just support them both. One day, many years down the road, support for the loser can be dropped.
Atom has the advantage of having a very well defined spec. The user agent doesn't have to guess if pointy brackets are content or markup. By using Atom, as a producer you will probably be better off, because you can trust the user agents to get it right. And for the same reason, it will be easy for user agents to support Atom (easier than supporting the numerous RSS variants) so there is little doubt every serious user agent will support Atom in the near future.
That doesn't mean it will take over from RSS 2.0 any time soon, but it will be a pretty riskless change.
-- If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
....some moron has defaced the page already (and is apparently deleting archived hostorical versions of it).
Life expectancy of unlocked Wiki page when slashdotted: 15-20 seconds.
-- --
What goes up must come down. Ask any SysAdmin.
copy and paste from google cache
by
emilng
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· Score: 1
I just copied the one from google cache back into the wiki - we'll see how long it takes before that asshole takes it down again.
RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. RSS 1.0
by
Feneric
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· Score: 4, Insightful
AFAIK the format war between RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 hasn't even ended yet. In spite of the version numbering, RSS 2.0 is more of a.95 than a 2.0 since it's an incremental improvement over.94. It doesn't really add any capabilities to RSS 1.0 (both can support enclosures). The only real difference is that RSS 1.0 is based on RDF while 2.0 isn't; this supposedly makes 2.0 simpler, but potentially less capable.
It's a pity that all the RSS folks couldn't simply hash together a common standard rather than wasting time on competing standards. Is 2.0 really that much simpler than 1.0? Is 1.0 really that much more capable than 2.0? Does Atom really add much to the mix? It seems that it ought to be possible to find a middle ground.
Re:RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. RSS 1.0
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Re:RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. RSS 1.0
by
ubernostrum
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· Score: 1
It's a pity that all the RSS folks couldn't simply hash together a common standard rather than wasting time on competing standards. Is 2.0 really that much simpler than 1.0? Is 1.0 really that much more capable than 2.0? Does Atom really add much to the mix? It seems that it ought to be possible to find a middle ground.
Without getting too much into the politics of the syndication world, the reason is that no-one wants to touch RSS 1.0 with a ten-foot pole (even without the bitterness and fallout from the name-grab fiasco, RDF-based syndication just never really caught on), and RSS 2.0 has been officially frozen. So the only way forward was to do something new.
One thing that really bothers me about RSS, no matter how much I like it, is how every site uses it differently. I was writing a simple aggregation program and using php/magpierss. Every single site puts the date and time of the items in a different tag. Some use datetime, some use pubdate, some use dc->date and some don't put the date! Seriously, no matter the standard it wont help if not everyone uses it fully and properly.
-- The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've got an open source aggregator (<plug mode="shameless">Feed for Mac OS X</plug>) and it seems most of the 'bug fixes' I have to do are directly related to some fools home-grown interpretation of how to deliver content.
Effectively, RSS (the concept, not the format) is in the 'tag soup' phase that the web was in seven years ago. While I expect this will all settle down as the concept (and value) of standardization is realized by content publishes and CMS vendors, it currently sucks rocks. It'll take time for all of this to shake out. Hell, I'm amazed anything works at all considering Dave Winer pretty much pulled it out of his ass in the first place...
As far as which standard to embrace - it really doesn't matter. You hook a namespace aware XML parser up to an HTTP request and then look for the interesting bits of information. The problem at the moment is that you have to look at lots of bits to find out which ones are the interesting ones - like writing browser sniffing web code. That'll settle down as the technology matures, though - just like web code.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the folk who abuse the entire concept by shoehorning fundamentally mismatched content into RSS. I'm looking right at you, Netflix Queue...
For the most part it doesn't matter which you use because client software is going to have to work with both now that they've both been deployed (and for a while Google was only publishing Atom, I'm not sure if they still do that but it forced aggregator developers to get on board).
But because an Atom feed must include a guid element, the client has a way of uniquely identifying an item. This means that when you subscribe to an atom feed, you're not going to see duplicate articles the way you do with RSS when the RSS feed doesn't include a guid or any unique identifier (which is legal) and the client has to make one up by hashing the content.
as long as rss doesn't require you to at least include blank versions of standardized tags we will have the same problems that html has. lots of people out there writing bad code that don't work well for the diversity of readers.
Most of the problems with RSS 2.0 that the article points out, are fixed in RSS 1.0.
For those who don't know, RSS 0.9x was basically Dave Winer's personal plaything. When the standards community put together an RSS 1.0 standard, he took his most recent 0.9x 'standard' and renamed it RSS 2.0 to make it look more up-to-date.
Why not take RSS 1.0 and fix the few problems it has?
-- GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Re:False dichotomy
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Why not take RSS 1.0 and fix the few problems it has?
So we'll have RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, and "3.0". Right.
Or we could simply use Atom ("1.0") which is designed from the ground up to be expandable and extensible for backward compatibility.
The fact that even people who can't stand Dave Winer had serious issues with RSS 1.0, and put their efforts behind another project, might have some significance that you're overlooking.
They've probably been itching for another good format war to take sides on.
We can go on and on...
by
Virtual+Karma
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· Score: 1
We can go on and on about the Atom and RSS war. But let me introduce you to something that uses the power of both. Please note that I'm not advertising my site.. I'm talking about Newster.net only because it is very relevant to this discussion.
Newster is aggregatates news from many websites that publish them in RSS. Once the news bits are in the database it uses the ATOM API to post it to the blog. And then it republishes it in ATOM (because its a blogger service). So what we have here is a website that publishes a new news every 15 minutes. No humans here.. and the cool thing is that RSS gets converted to ATOM. Its very easy to write such scripts... so why even fight??
software suggestion for software front page
by
tolonuga
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· Score: 1
opensc.org has a front page with mostly news entries. I'd like to move from the manualy written php code to some software, where we can publish announcements on new versions, and atom and/or rss feed would be nice. any suggestion?
Re:Willy on Wheels
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You're so manly. You can change a totally unprotected web page. I bet it took you years of hanging out at 2600 meetings to master such mean feats of l33tdom.
who cares about the user!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
All this format commotion just adds more work for programmers. And not a good kinda work either!
It isn't so hard to parse rss or atom, but to do both you pretty much have to separate it out and that might mean twice the code. Pretty lame. You can fake it on the differences between versions of rss if you don't mind leaving stuff out... I tried to fake it on the differences between atom and rss, seemed to work just fine, until I started comparing what it should look like with what it did!
I thought I was gonna be smart and maintain a feed for my personal site. When I finally got sick of trying to explain to all my relatives and friends about what rss is and how they could easily see what updates had been made... My feed's use became limited to listing updates on the front page of that site.
** by the way, for those interested, I just killed firefox- it died after I refused to accept a certificate for some site that I had already closed the tab for. I think firefox is still trying to figure out what to do about the refusal...
Parent Makes No Sense
by
samael
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· Score: 4, Informative
Atom isn't forked off of RSS, it's another implementation of the concept of syndicated content. RSS itself isn't a concept, it's a specification for a data transfer format.
The parent post really doesn't make any sense at all.
The fight between Atom and RSS2.0 was fueled for a while from (in my opinion) a clash of egos between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer. Nowadays heads are cooler and there might be some kind of standardization in the long end.
In passing, look at the interesting rant by Dave Winer in his blog not too long ago.
Has anyone noticed none of these standards have any form of e-mail obfuscation, or any support for contact methods that protect publishers from harvesting?
Re:No e-mail obfuscation?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Okay, tell me how you plan on implementing that in a standardized way that prevents spammers from retreiving email addresses but allows everyone else to?
As someone who's implemented them both
by
savala
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· Score: 4, Informative
Atom wins hands-down. Things are actually well specified.
I can just walk through the atom specification, implementing it as I go, and not have any questions about what is required, what type of content can be present in any one element, I don't have to look up five even less well-specified different modules just to get the basics of the feed together (and thus also don't have to worry about namespaces), what elements and attributes mean (actually, I spent a minor five minutes agonizing over what I should put in the term atribute of the category element, given that the label attribute contains the human readable version, before realizing that I was completely free in this, as the "scheme" os up to myself, and deciding to mirror how categories are named in the url on the website (which I found to be consistent with various other already existing atom 1.0 feeds that I checked)), or... well, basically any kind of question that you need to think about as you implement a new and previously unknown specification.
RSS on the other hand (any of the 9 incompatible versions)... *shudders* Those specifications don't tell me anything. I copy/paste from other feeds and heavily use the feedvalidator, but... *shakes his head*
Once all feedreaders have been updated to support Atom 1.0 completely, I'll go and pull the plug on the remaining RSS feeds, and good riddance too!
RSS has terribly crappy version control
by
hellfire
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· Score: 1
1) It was written by Mark Pilgrim, one of the major minds behind creating the specification for Atom. 2) Mark's a personal friend of mine, and I personally think he makes sense.
The point of the article is, however, that RSS is terribly broken and fragmented, versions aren't compatible with each other, and it's just a plain mess. Look further on his site and you'll see articles as to not only why he helped create Atom 1.0 but articles with early specs.
RSS is a wonderful idea, now it has to be implemented properly. One good way to do this is to start over.
--
"All great wisdom is contained in.signature files"
Kids, Atom's not new. It's been developed by lots of smart folks.
Version 1.0 is new however. It's only been 'released' a couple of days ago, and still needs to go through some formalities before becoming an official standard.
That said, none of the parts that Firefox uses have 'changed' between 0.3 and 1.0 (that is, there's a new namespace, and a new required element, but I assume Firefox is liberal enough in what it accepts not to be troubled by this), so it should all just work out of the box.
Thunderbird might be another issue, what with renaming <modified> to <updated> and <issued> to <published>
google use atom
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
atom is really better, but like someone says, theyll choose vhs over beta even if beta is better;)
Is RSS 2.0 one of the Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer http://www.memepool.com/Date/253/ RSS formats or one of the rival RSS formats created to annoy Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer?
The only missing feature
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
is a link in the RSS feeds to the main page of the site so I don't need the Slashdot RSS feed and a link to the main page next to it.
The greatest advantage Atom has over RSS is indeed its eXtensibility.
So while RSS is stuck with regular HTML (escaped markup, whoa!) and images in its contents, Atom can already embed other XML namespaces like XHTML, SVG, MathML, FOAF, Dublin Core...
I think the comparison is similar to the HTML/XHTML one: though right now they can give the same results, in the (not so distant I hope) future Atom/XHTML will become the languages of choice.
Not a lot of people use XHTML+SVG yet, but with Opera supporting it (and FF in its 1.1 release we all hope), its mindshare will grow.
We all drool in front of the Google Maps API, but let's see what happens when more and more stuff becomes really semantically significant.
Re:Semantics
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
>So while RSS is stuck with regular HTML (escaped markup, whoa!) and images in its contents, Atom can already embed other XML namespaces like XHTML, SVG, MathML, FOAF, Dublin Core...
FOAF and DC can be used in RSS 1.0 (which is RDF) without any problems. It's even quite natural to use RDF vocabularies in an RDF syndication format. I agree on the content encoding matter. Guessing what format RSS 0.9x/2.0 tags use (plain text, escaped HTML, CDATA,...) sucks big time (see http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2004/03/11-ways-to- valid-rss)
This comparison (on the Atom site, natch) misses one very important point, which is the rapid rise of podcasting and videoblogging. All of these "rich media" syndications rely on the <enclosure> tag, which is exclusive to RSS 2.0.
It's funny how this writeup doesn't even mention enclosures, despite the hundreds of thousands of people downloading content this way. The only place it comes up is in the chart at the end, which makes some side reference to <link rel="enclosure"> in Atom, which is a far kludgier (and nonstandard) way to do things.
-- ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
The only place it comes up is in the chart at the end, which makes some side reference to <link rel="enclosure"> in Atom, which is a far kludgier (and nonstandard) way to do things.
Atom has thought about rich media far more than RSS2.0. For example, one of the problems of podcasting is that popular podcasts require stacks of bandwidth. One solution is to offer a bit torrent link. RSS2.0 only allows one enclosure per item, so you can't offer both a straight download and a torrent.
In Atom its straightforward. Two link elements, both of a rel="enclosure", set the type to the mp3 mime-type and set its href for a straight download, set the other to the bittorrent mime-type and the href to a torrent file. No problems.
What happens when more than one torrent surfaces? Just add another link element.
Add a windows media player version - just add another link, and set the type attribute with the right mime-type.
Translated your podcast to a different language? Add another link element, and use the hreflang attribute to define the language.
The flexibility of link leaves enclosures trailing in the dust. Enclosures limit to one element per item. The bittorrent attribute is just an untidy hack.
I've recently "discovered" podcasting... i thought it was straight-old streaming MPEG audio (like Shoutcast plugin for Winamp, which enjoyed popularity a few years ago), but instead is RSS delivery of MP3 audio files - reminds me of when i was a kid and used to do my own "radio shows" on a dual cassete deck stereo. No different than posting the files online with a web server.
I just don't get it. Then again, i don't get a lot of recent computer trends... i'm turning 25, and already feel old.
Re:Podcasting
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, RSS 1.0 also supports enclosures although the syntax for them is slightly different than it is for RSS 2.0. See this page for more info.
The problem with RSS 1.0 is that it is more complex than RSS 9.x (a designation which should include "2.0"), this is caused by two design decisions:
RSS 1.0 is infinitely extensible because it can be combined with other RDF schemas. In order to extend RSS 9.x, the standard must be extended. This allows its expansion to be controlled, which seems more managable, but as time goes on, features get duct-taped to it in ugly ways.
Because of RSS 1.0's extensibility, its syntax is less human-friendly. This was an issue when syndication was starting out because people needed to be able to roll their own aggregators and debug summaries. Now that all that work is done, only computers ever read feeds, so it really doesn't matter what the syntax is.
RSS 9.x was a textbook initial solution, and it contributed to getting syndication out of the gates, but the time has come to put away childish things.
Re:What's Wrong With RSS 1.0
by
ubernostrum
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· Score: 1
RSS 1.0 is infinitely extensible because it can be combined with other RDF schemas. In order to extend RSS 9.x, the standard must be extended.
Ah, so you don't know anything about syndication formats, then?
This was an issue when syndication was starting out because people needed to be able to roll their own aggregators and debug summaries. Now that all that work is done, only computers ever read feeds, so it really doesn't matter what the syntax is.
Ah, so you don't know anything about syndication formats, then.
That's because RSS 9.x (which should include "2.0") has a very similar design philosophy to Perl. It's not supposed to be elegant, it's supposed to do whatever needs to be done to work ASAP. It's also writer-friendly over reader-friendly.
Does RSS 1.0 have any problems that aren't inherint to RDF? And does RDF have any problems that aren't caused by expressing it in XML?
Sure, RSS 1.0 takes more work to understand up front, but once you get RDF isn't it just another schema? And these days, now that blog software has automatic feeds and there are aggregators available on every platform, how many humans actually need to read it?
Yeah, the big advantage of RSS 1.0 is that it's basically using the RDF model. Yes, it has a "regular" format, but I don't much care about that, because I consume it using my RDF tools. The nice thing that you get is the ability to hang assertions (using arbitrary properties) off RSS items. Thus, RSS+Events (as an example) - although frankly it means you have the ability to have "rich" (or if you prefer, "multimedia") RSS feeds. Or you can refer to your FOAF entries. And so on.
Atom gives you more-or-less the same thing; its advantage is mostly that it just doesn't have a name that automatically gets Dave Whiner frothing; (also, they've actually specified a protocol as well as a format, but that part's trivial).
Congratulations, you Get It:-)...Atom gives you more-or-less the same thing
Um, wow, thanks.:) But why support Atom if it isn't RDF? It's a shame the community got fractured in the first place, but it seems like the powers behind Atom + the powers behind RSS 1.0 are enough to tell Dave to stop whining.
Guess the answer to that is that the RSS version number battle is one not worth fighting?
Where's the backwards compatability?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Wasn't one of the advantages of XML being backwards compatability?
Re:Where's the backwards compatability?
by
Linus+Torvaalds
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· Score: 1
The backwards compatibility is under the assumption that the people using XML do sensible things.
In RSS before the most recent change, certain element types can contain normal text (e.g. <foo>x < y is a formula</foo>) and HTML that is doubly encoded (e.g. <foo>x &lt; y is a <em>formula</em></foo>).
As far as the rules of XML go, that's all just text. It's the RSS specification that says what the text means. The RSS specification hides the markup from normal XML rules by encoding it instead of using namespaces.
So basically, if a feed reader sees < in the text, it has no way of knowing whether it's meant to be an actual less-than sign in normal text, or if it's meant to be part of the markup in HTML.
Then the RSS board went and changed the "frozen" RSS 2.0 specification to say that it's always doubly-encoded HTML. That's great, except this "frozen" specification has suddenly changed in such a way as to make previously valid feeds (e.g. the Reuters feeds) invalid. And they refused to admit that it was an incompatible change, and refused to change the version number. Their reasoning for not changing the version number? Because the spec is frozen! Gotta love the logic on that one, huh? So now it is possible to author a feed that is simultaneously valid RSS 2.0 and invalid RSS 2.0 - depending on what version of RSS 2.0 you are talking about.
And people wonder why Atom and proper standardisation is needed.
I thought the article was talking about my next car - the Ariel Atom. 0-100kph in 2.9 seconds for under 50K USD, thankyouverymuch.
-- 'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.'
--D. T. Suzuki
Folks, please support Atom
by
Paradox
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· Score: 1
Okay, people. Part of the point here is that this issue is still being decided.
With that in mind, please support Atom in your future projects. Atom really is a better user experience for end users, and it's better specified and easier to work with as a developer.
The RSS folks are great, and they've put in a ton of hard work, but the Atom spec is Just Better right now, and offers at lot more bang for the developmental buck, not to mention it handles feed aggregations much better.
IE, Firefox/Sage and Safari all support Atom 1.0. So there is no reason not to use it!
-- Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Re:Folks, please support Atom
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The difference, in this case, is that the decision to use RSS or Atom will be made by the website operators, not the end consumers.
You are right about that to the point that the web site owners decide what format to use...
The consumers will use what the webmasters use.
Now that is mistaken. The consumers will use what the consumers use. I know that sounds redundant, but consider - Safari already has built in RSS support. IE will have built in RSS support. So how many consumers will actually use Atom when so many things support RSS? And if most consumers are not there using it, why would a webmaster decide to support Atom if there are no users using it and everyone is hankering for RSS feeds?
I think it far more likley that RSS will evolve to support any features from Atom that webmasters like and demand.
-- "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I use Sage for my reader, so I really don't care what format feeds are in. Actually, I never researched the differences, so every time I had a choice between Atom and RSS feeds from the same source, I always chose RSS, because I thought Atom was an older style, and also thought that if I ever switched to another reader, it'd be easier to move my feeds if they were all RSS.
Use NNTP for RSS and Atom feeds.
by
reed
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· Score: 1
RSS and Atom are nice, but you still have to keep requesting the thing over HTTP to get updates, which seems completely counter to the concept of getting a concise update of changes or news.
Feed files should be published over NNTP.
Error in the first paragraph?
by
spectecjr
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· Score: 1
Deployment 2005/07/13: RSS 2.0 is widely deployed and Atom 1.0 not at all.
Er... blogger.com (Google's blog service) uses Atom. I think that might count as having been deployed, just maybe...
Re:Error in the first paragraph?
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Kakurenbo+Shogun
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· Score: 1
Blogger publishes Atom 0.3--one of the early drafts which was never intended to be the final version that was widely implemented. Atom 1.0 is in the process of clearing the last hurdles to being officially defined by the IETF and is being implemented as we speak. "Not at all" is already out-of-date, though currently deployment is very narrow. That will change quickly.
No, no, NO--VHS was technically superior
by
bonch
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· Score: 0, Insightful
Back to the VHS Vs. Betamax days eh? If there's one thing that war proved, it's that technical sophistication is irrelevant: mindshare is what matters.
This urban myth needs to die.
VHS was the technically superior format. It provided running times longer than an hour (most movies are longer than an hour, you know), it had slightly superior audio quality, and by subtly lowering picture quality, you could record stuff for up to 8 hours!
The "Betamax was superior but died out due to mindshare" argument is wrong. VHS was superior, and therefore gained mindshare.
Re:No, no, NO--VHS was technically superior
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I see one of your other accounts got mod points. Congratulations!
Re:No, no, NO--VHS was technically superior
by
iminplaya
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· Score: 1
The ONLY thing superior about VHS was the marketing. The longer recording time helped, but if you ever decide to look inside the machine, you would find that Beta is vastly superior technically. It was based on professional/industrial strength machinery. Just look at M2(VHS-pro?) and see how that went. The Alpha chip is vastly superior to Intel. Why don't we see very many of them?? There is a difference between percieved value and real value. It is the percieved value that worked for VHS, Intel, etc.
That's a dumb comparison. Betamax would still be around if users and distributors weren't forced by economics to choose a single format. You couldn't buy a VCR that did both formats and the cost of supporting an extra format was too much for distributors. By contrast, most aggregators support both RSS and Atom, and its pretty easy to distribute in both formats if you have a mind to. The only issue is whether the extra features of Atom are worth bothering with.
Multicast/Unicast push protocol
by
sploxx
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· Score: 1
I RTFA, but I couldn't find information whether one of the new standards allows to push content to the user in UDP datagrams.
Apparently, much bandwidth is wasted just because people can't get themselves out of the only-OSI-level-7+HTTP corset.
Re:Multicast/Unicast push protocol
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Probably because push approaches don't tend to work too well with things like firewalls and NAT... actions initiated by the client tend to be more reliable under those circumstances.
This wiki misses the fact that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are competing formats, not progressive versions of the same standard.
RSS 1.0 is RDF-based like the original Netscape version of RSS, and is more extensible and structured than RSS 2.0 or Atom.
Annoyingly, neither camp wants to let go of the name "RSS" because they both lay claim to it, but it does actually stand for different things ("RDF Site Summary" / "Really Simple Syndication").
Slashdot Mirror
Most users cant tell the difference, even if they cared to.
So, as a conclusion: Noone cares.
Since Microsoft is throwing their weight behind RSS, it's pretty obvious it will be the winner.
... IE7 will support 'extended' RSS. So there!
0 .aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/06/24/43239
Regards, Yogix
I really don't get what this stuff is for. So you can see news articles in one place? Big deal... Handy, but there's far more buzz than that merits. So what's an example of something really cool that wouldn't have been possible without this earth shatteringly brilliant technology?
This isn't trolling, just confusion. I would consider myself to be relatively informed about tech matters, however there is very little info about atom and it is hard to google for. Would it be possible to have a tiny summary as to what atom is ?
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
Maybe Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 can be combined to create "RFusion 0"? Just an idea...
Atom vs. Trinity 1:0
1 6/079249&tid=103&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/
I see no concrete illustration about why Atom is superior to RSS. Why would is necessarily "win". >
Seeing as how slashdot uses rss, ...
Either that article is heavily biased or ATOM 1.0 completely demolishes everything that RSS is/was/used to be. I wish that the article would have at least showed one or two points where RSS is better, but it appears that there isn't any such points.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Back to the VHS Vs. Betamax days eh? If there's one thing that war proved, it's that technical sophistication is irrelevant: mindshare is what matters. If nobody's using it, it doesn't matter if it has the prettiest widgets.
That said, one nice thing about this format war is that there doesn't have to be a loser. It's fairly easy to handle multiple formats in software (note the number of redundant music formats), unlike hardware which is usually impossible. If the process of reading RSS tags or Atom tags is made transparent to the user, who cares who wins?
Doesn't it depend on what IE7 will support?
I mean there are still 60% who still use that incompatible Browser because they believe that it is the internet and the Modem is a special powercord.
Defend yourself RSS...
Smack!
Kapow!
At least put your hands in front of your face.
Whack!
Bam!
Get up off the mat, RSS!!!
Get up!!
I can't watch anymore...
Atom is both a syndication format and an API for creation, updating, and deletion of content. It's already in widespread use by Blogger.
What's been (all but) finalized is the syndication format (and rules for extending it). This allows the working group to firm up the details of the publishing API, which, for my money, is the real payoff with Atom.
A pretty good overview of the history of RSS and the motivations behind Atom is here.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
While the article was a nice feature comparison of the two, it really didn't get into the "format war" question at the top of the page here.
Besides industry support, my only question would be "which one is growing?" Which of these formats is expected to get a new version number sometime soon?
If you ask me, that is why Microsoft is talking about adding "extensions" to RSS -- by growing and adapting the standard, it gets more bells and whistles, more application support, and more momentum in the development community.
Oracle: More Complicated Pricing Model Needed?
My RSS reader (Safari built-in) has been banned for 72 frigging days, never mind 72 hours. Anybody at /. there?
Already done- Firefox supports lots of different sorts of RSS and Atom already.
You're soaking in it. (Firefox has supported Atom since at least the first full release of the RSS support; the Sage plugin also supports Atom). Kids, Atom's not new. It's been developed by lots of smart folks.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
They're both unencumbered and available to the public (AFAIK), so client software can just support them both. One day, many years down the road, support for the loser can be dropped.
Who needs a format war? Hooray for standards!
WILLY ON WHEELS??
Perhaps this article should have been about security issues with Wiki instead.
....some moron has defaced the page already (and is apparently deleting archived hostorical versions of it). Life expectancy of unlocked Wiki page when slashdotted: 15-20 seconds.
-- What goes up must come down. Ask any SysAdmin.
Changing the entire page to this:
WILLY ON WHEELS!
World famous Wiki vandal!
pwned
is the kind of thing that makes people hate Slashdot.
No existe.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2F www.intertwingly.net%2Fwiki%2Fpie%2FRss20AndAtom10 ComparedGoogle Cache, now that it's been defaced.
That style of writing is called CamelCase.
and it doesn't make their RSS-files incompatible with "standard" readers.
I just copied the one from google cache back into the wiki - we'll see how long it takes before that asshole takes it down again.
AFAIK the format war between RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 hasn't even ended yet. In spite of the version numbering, RSS 2.0 is more of a .95 than a 2.0 since it's an incremental improvement over .94. It doesn't really add any capabilities to RSS 1.0 (both can support enclosures). The only real difference is that RSS 1.0 is based on RDF while 2.0 isn't; this supposedly makes 2.0 simpler, but potentially less capable.
It's a pity that all the RSS folks couldn't simply hash together a common standard rather than wasting time on competing standards. Is 2.0 really that much simpler than 1.0? Is 1.0 really that much more capable than 2.0? Does Atom really add much to the mix? It seems that it ought to be possible to find a middle ground.
One thing that really bothers me about RSS, no matter how much I like it, is how every site uses it differently. I was writing a simple aggregation program and using php/magpierss. Every single site puts the date and time of the items in a different tag. Some use datetime, some use pubdate, some use dc->date and some don't put the date! Seriously, no matter the standard it wont help if not everyone uses it fully and properly.
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But because an Atom feed must include a guid element, the client has a way of uniquely identifying an item. This means that when you subscribe to an atom feed, you're not going to see duplicate articles the way you do with RSS when the RSS feed doesn't include a guid or any unique identifier (which is legal) and the client has to make one up by hashing the content.
I wrote a bit about this here.
Most of the problems with RSS 2.0 that the article points out, are fixed in RSS 1.0.
For those who don't know, RSS 0.9x was basically Dave Winer's personal plaything. When the standards community put together an RSS 1.0 standard, he took his most recent 0.9x 'standard' and renamed it RSS 2.0 to make it look more up-to-date.
Why not take RSS 1.0 and fix the few problems it has?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So do porn sites prefer RSS or Atom?
They've probably been itching for another good format war to take sides on.
Newster is aggregatates news from many websites that publish them in RSS. Once the news bits are in the database it uses the ATOM API to post it to the blog. And then it republishes it in ATOM (because its a blogger service). So what we have here is a website that publishes a new news every 15 minutes. No humans here.. and the cool thing is that RSS gets converted to ATOM. Its very easy to write such scripts... so why even fight??
fuvoo: watch something
opensc.org has a front page with mostly news entries. I'd like to move from the manualy written php code to some software, where we
can publish announcements on new versions, and atom and/or rss feed would be nice. any suggestion?
You're so manly. You can change a totally unprotected web page. I bet it took you years of hanging out at 2600 meetings to master such mean feats of l33tdom.
All this format commotion just adds more work for programmers. And not a good kinda work either!
It isn't so hard to parse rss or atom, but to do both you pretty much have to separate it out and that might mean twice the code. Pretty lame. You can fake it on the differences between versions of rss if you don't mind leaving stuff out... I tried to fake it on the differences between atom and rss, seemed to work just fine, until I started comparing what it should look like with what it did!
I thought I was gonna be smart and maintain a feed for my personal site. When I finally got sick of trying to explain to all my relatives and friends about what rss is and how they could easily see what updates had been made... My feed's use became limited to listing updates on the front page of that site.
** by the way, for those interested, I just killed firefox- it died after I refused to accept a certificate for some site that I had already closed the tab for. I think firefox is still trying to figure out what to do about the refusal...
Atom isn't forked off of RSS, it's another implementation of the concept of syndicated content. RSS itself isn't a concept, it's a specification for a data transfer format.
The parent post really doesn't make any sense at all.
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Since Google are throwing their weight behind Atom, it's pretty obvious who will be the winner.
My Journal
The article in wikipedia on RSS is more balanced.
The fight between Atom and RSS2.0 was fueled for a while from (in my opinion) a clash of egos between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer. Nowadays heads are cooler and there might be some kind of standardization in the long end.
In passing, look at the interesting rant by Dave Winer in his blog not too long ago.
Has anyone noticed none of these standards have any form of e-mail obfuscation, or any support for contact methods that protect publishers from harvesting?
Read the article. That's the entire frickin' point of the article.
here
Atom wins hands-down. Things are actually well specified .
I can just walk through the atom specification, implementing it as I go, and not have any questions about what is required, what type of content can be present in any one element, I don't have to look up five even less well-specified different modules just to get the basics of the feed together (and thus also don't have to worry about namespaces), what elements and attributes mean (actually, I spent a minor five minutes agonizing over what I should put in the term atribute of the category element, given that the label attribute contains the human readable version, before realizing that I was completely free in this, as the "scheme" os up to myself, and deciding to mirror how categories are named in the url on the website (which I found to be consistent with various other already existing atom 1.0 feeds that I checked)), or... well, basically any kind of question that you need to think about as you implement a new and previously unknown specification.
RSS on the other hand (any of the 9 incompatible versions)... *shudders* Those specifications don't tell me anything. I copy/paste from other feeds and heavily use the feedvalidator, but... *shakes his head*
Once all feedreaders have been updated to support Atom 1.0 completely, I'll go and pull the plug on the remaining RSS feeds, and good riddance too!
I freely admit that I'm linking to this article that might show some bias. Why might it be biased?
1) It was written by Mark Pilgrim, one of the major minds behind creating the specification for Atom.
2) Mark's a personal friend of mine, and I personally think he makes sense.
The point of the article is, however, that RSS is terribly broken and fragmented, versions aren't compatible with each other, and it's just a plain mess. Look further on his site and you'll see articles as to not only why he helped create Atom 1.0 but articles with early specs.
RSS is a wonderful idea, now it has to be implemented properly. One good way to do this is to start over.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Version 1.0 is new however. It's only been 'released' a couple of days ago, and still needs to go through some formalities before becoming an official standard.
That said, none of the parts that Firefox uses have 'changed' between 0.3 and 1.0 (that is, there's a new namespace, and a new required element, but I assume Firefox is liberal enough in what it accepts not to be troubled by this), so it should all just work out of the box.
Thunderbird might be another issue, what with renaming <modified> to <updated> and <issued> to <published>
atom is really better, but like someone says, theyll choose vhs over beta even if beta is better ;)
Is RSS 2.0 one of the Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer http://www.memepool.com/Date/253/ RSS formats or one of the rival RSS formats created to annoy Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer?
is a link in the RSS feeds to the main page of the site so I don't need the Slashdot RSS feed and a link to the main page next to it.
The greatest advantage Atom has over RSS is indeed its eXtensibility.
So while RSS is stuck with regular HTML (escaped markup, whoa!) and images in its contents, Atom can already embed other XML namespaces like XHTML, SVG, MathML, FOAF, Dublin Core...
I think the comparison is similar to the HTML/XHTML one: though right now they can give the same results, in the (not so distant I hope) future Atom/XHTML will become the languages of choice.
Not a lot of people use XHTML+SVG yet, but with Opera supporting it (and FF in its 1.1 release we all hope), its mindshare will grow.
We all drool in front of the Google Maps API, but let's see what happens when more and more stuff becomes really semantically significant.
It's funny how this writeup doesn't even mention enclosures, despite the hundreds of thousands of people downloading content this way. The only place it comes up is in the chart at the end, which makes some side reference to <link rel="enclosure"> in Atom, which is a far kludgier (and nonstandard) way to do things.
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The problem with RSS 1.0 is that it is more complex than RSS 9.x (a designation which should include "2.0"), this is caused by two design decisions:
RSS 1.0 is infinitely extensible because it can be combined with other RDF schemas. In order to extend RSS 9.x, the standard must be extended. This allows its expansion to be controlled, which seems more managable, but as time goes on, features get duct-taped to it in ugly ways.
Because of RSS 1.0's extensibility, its syntax is less human-friendly. This was an issue when syndication was starting out because people needed to be able to roll their own aggregators and debug summaries. Now that all that work is done, only computers ever read feeds, so it really doesn't matter what the syntax is.
RSS 9.x was a textbook initial solution, and it contributed to getting syndication out of the gates, but the time has come to put away childish things.
That's because RSS 9.x (which should include "2.0") has a very similar design philosophy to Perl. It's not supposed to be elegant, it's supposed to do whatever needs to be done to work ASAP. It's also writer-friendly over reader-friendly.
RSS 1.0 is slightly more complex but a gajillion times more elegant. It has actual standards for metadata.
Does RSS 1.0 have any problems that aren't inherint to RDF? And does RDF have any problems that aren't caused by expressing it in XML?
Sure, RSS 1.0 takes more work to understand up front, but once you get RDF isn't it just another schema? And these days, now that blog software has automatic feeds and there are aggregators available on every platform, how many humans actually need to read it?
Wasn't one of the advantages of XML being backwards compatability?
I thought the article was talking about my next car - the Ariel Atom. 0-100kph in 2.9 seconds for under 50K USD, thankyouverymuch.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
Okay, people. Part of the point here is that this issue is still being decided.
With that in mind, please support Atom in your future projects. Atom really is a better user experience for end users, and it's better specified and easier to work with as a developer.
The RSS folks are great, and they've put in a ton of hard work, but the Atom spec is Just Better right now, and offers at lot more bang for the developmental buck, not to mention it handles feed aggregations much better.
IE, Firefox/Sage and Safari all support Atom 1.0. So there is no reason not to use it!
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The difference, in this case, is that the decision to use RSS or Atom will be made by the website operators, not the end consumers.
You are right about that to the point that the web site owners decide what format to use...
The consumers will use what the webmasters use.
Now that is mistaken. The consumers will use what the consumers use. I know that sounds redundant, but consider - Safari already has built in RSS support. IE will have built in RSS support. So how many consumers will actually use Atom when so many things support RSS? And if most consumers are not there using it, why would a webmaster decide to support Atom if there are no users using it and everyone is hankering for RSS feeds?
I think it far more likley that RSS will evolve to support any features from Atom that webmasters like and demand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I use Sage for my reader, so I really don't care what format feeds are in.
Actually, I never researched the differences, so every time I had a choice between Atom and RSS feeds from the same source, I always chose RSS, because I thought Atom was an older style, and also thought that if I ever switched to another reader, it'd be easier to move my feeds if they were all RSS.
RSS and Atom are nice, but you still have to keep requesting the thing over HTTP to get updates, which seems completely counter to the concept of getting a concise update of changes or news.
Feed files should be published over NNTP.
Deployment
2005/07/13: RSS 2.0 is widely deployed and Atom 1.0 not at all.
Er... blogger.com (Google's blog service) uses Atom. I think that might count as having been deployed, just maybe...
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Back to the VHS Vs. Betamax days eh? If there's one thing that war proved, it's that technical sophistication is irrelevant: mindshare is what matters.
This urban myth needs to die.
VHS was the technically superior format. It provided running times longer than an hour (most movies are longer than an hour, you know), it had slightly superior audio quality, and by subtly lowering picture quality, you could record stuff for up to 8 hours!
The "Betamax was superior but died out due to mindshare" argument is wrong. VHS was superior, and therefore gained mindshare.
That's a dumb comparison. Betamax would still be around if users and distributors weren't forced by economics to choose a single format. You couldn't buy a VCR that did both formats and the cost of supporting an extra format was too much for distributors. By contrast, most aggregators support both RSS and Atom, and its pretty easy to distribute in both formats if you have a mind to. The only issue is whether the extra features of Atom are worth bothering with.
I RTFA, but I couldn't find information whether one of the new standards allows to push content to the user in UDP datagrams.
Apparently, much bandwidth is wasted just because people can't get themselves out of the only-OSI-level-7+HTTP corset.
This wiki misses the fact that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are competing formats, not progressive versions of the same standard.
t ml 5 /magazine/rss_tut.html
RSS 1.0 is RDF-based like the original Netscape version of RSS, and is more extensible and structured than RSS 2.0 or Atom.
Annoyingly, neither camp wants to let go of the name "RSS" because they both lay claim to it, but it does actually stand for different things ("RDF Site Summary" / "Really Simple Syndication").
Readers would get more value from pages such as these:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/23/rssone.html
http://www.burningdoor.com/eric/archives/000239.h
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/08/2
http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/