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."
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.
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
·
· 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
Re:Once again
by
jez9999
·
· 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.
Re:I would consider...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Here you go(it's tiny, you might have to squint):
It's not pretty folks
by
revery
·
· 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...
Atom's More Than A Syndication Format
by
arthurs_sidekick
·
· 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
·
· 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.
Re:Firefox support?
by
superskippy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Already done- Firefox supports lots of different sorts of RSS and Atom already.
Re:Firefox support?
by
arthurs_sidekick
·
· 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.
Cache
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's called namespaces...
by
jeroenb
·
· Score: 4, Informative
and it doesn't make their RSS-files incompatible with "standard" readers.
Re:I would consider...
by
superskippy
·
· 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.
RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. RSS 1.0
by
Feneric
·
· 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.
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!
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.
Re:We use it!
by
TheRaven64
·
· 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.
Parent Makes No Sense
by
samael
·
· 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.
Re:As If I Cared
by
TheRaven64
·
· 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.
Re:Where's the comparison?
by
Isofarro
·
· 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:I would consider...
by
Linus+Torvaalds
·
· 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:What is this stuff *for* anyway?
by
shokk
·
· 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."
As someone who's implemented them both
by
savala
·
· 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!
Re:I would consider...
by
laffer1
·
· 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.:)
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
Maybe Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 can be combined to create "RFusion 0"? Just an idea...
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?
Here you go(it's tiny, you might have to squint):
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?
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.
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.
and it doesn't make their RSS-files incompatible with "standard" readers.
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.
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
My Journal
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people.
Three? Try nine.
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.
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."
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!
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.
.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.
:)
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
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.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone