RSS Wins, Signals Atom's Death Toll?

S. Housley writes " RSS appears to have conquered the last hurdle in becoming the industry syndication standard. Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification. Even Atom's steadfast supporter Google, appears to have seen the light. Google had previously acquired Blogger, a popular blogging tool that uses the Atom specification to syndicate the contents of blogs created on the Blogger platform. In the past Google had strategically steered clear of endorsing the RSS specification hoping that Atom, would take hold. Google's recent new service that allows web surfers to monitor Google News using either RSS or Atom feeds, appears to be an acknowledgment that perhaps in purchasing Blogger, they chose the wrong specification. "

Comments

Atom's Death Toll

[daveschroeder]

Wow, how many people did Atom kill? I always liked RSS better anyway. Now that I know not only that RSS isn't a killer, but has also been monitoring Atom's killing, and indeed even signaling its death toll to the authorities, I'm even more in support of it.

Now if only RSS could sound Atom's death knell...

(In case the editors have seen fit to correct it, the original title was "Developers: RSS' Win, Signals Atom's Death Toll".)

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Radres]

(In case the editors have seen fit to correct it...

Ha. Hahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[minus_273]

are you sure it wasn't a Death Troll?
"RSS' Win, Signals Atom's Death Toll" could really be an article about Orcs on the rampage after receiving the fiery signal of RSS' victory on the glorious battlefield.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[VoidWraith]

Not only that, but the comma has no place there...

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Anonymous Coward]

'Toll' is a perfectly appropriate word; from answers.com:

knell: To ring slowly and solemnly, especially for a funeral; toll.

toll: To sound (a large bell) slowly at regular intervals.

Admittedly 'knell' is the better of the two words but the use of 'toll' is not wrong.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even more obvious, from m-w.com: Main Entry: 1knell
Pronunciation: 'nel
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English cnyllan; akin to Middle High German erknellen to toll
transitive senses : to summon or announce by or as if by a knell intransitive senses
1 : to ring especially for a death, funeral, or disaster : TOLL
2 : to sound in an ominous manner or with an ominous effect

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Martin Blank]

Would the toning of an RSS reader for the update of the Slashdot feed to include this story count as sounding the death knell?

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[daveschroeder]

No, you're actually wrong.

We're not talking about individual words here, for one, we're talking about phrases.

"Death toll" is the total number of people who die as a result of a disaster or other adverse event.

"Death knell" is a bell rung to announce death, or an omen of death or destruction.

So to say "death toll" in this context is completely and utterly wrong, and the fact that "toll", on its own, also can mean to ring a bell is actually completely unrelated and incidental.

But even if we do, for a moment, accept your assertion that "death toll" is an acceptable use here, the use of "signals" in conjunction with it as also meaningless.

Let's face it: the author meant to say "sounds the death knell" or "rings the death knell" or something to that effect, and just got it horribly, horribly wrong in his mind, likely using the same logic you did ("Hmm, I've heard about a bell tolling before, so "death toll" must be what I'm looking for.").

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I think the point he was getting at that, when used in everyday conversation, "death toll" usually has a completely different connotation than "death knell".

However, I must thank the submitter for giving me the image of a syndication standard running around gunning down web sites and clients.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[randm.ca]

I'm not an English major, but I don't see how "Death Knell" is any more correct than "Death Toll". Sure, using knell would have been less ambiguous than toll, but if you really want to pick on the title, you would have been better off questioning the comma.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Anonymous Coward]

The headline in effect is saying that Atom killed a lot of people. And somehow RSS won something and this anounced the death toll. The death toll is the number of people killed. That's the expression, that's just the way it is. And the extraneous comma doesn't help one little bit.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Anonymous Coward]

In case the editors have seen fit to correct it...

You must be new here!

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[ch-chuck]

Guess you could say that Atom bombed - which would explain the death toll.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Evro]

What's even weirder is that the headline in my RSS feed ends with "< ? >", and if you look at the source for the page, it's there.

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="RSS' Win, Signals Atom's Death Toll&lt;?&gt; -- article related to Developers and The Internet."><LINK REL="top"       TITLE="News for nerds, stuff that matters" HREF="//slashdot.org/" >

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[nine-times]

I agree when people say "death toll", the world "toll" seems to be taking a sense closer to "toll bridge" than "funeral toll". However, it is true that "toll" can mean the ringing of bells to signal that someone has died. So toll="death knell".

In fact, both "toll" and "knell" can be defined as something like, "the ringing of bells, especially when marking the time of someone's death." They're pretty synonymous. It's a small mistake, in that they said "death toll" instead of "funeral toll". (At least, I've heard "funeral toll" before, but I'm sure someone will tell me that's wrong too.)

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[OldeTimeGeek]

I thought "death toll" was what the pennies on your eyes were for...

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[jkauzlar]

and just got it horribly, horribly wrong in his mind

Grammar freaks call this a malapropism.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[squidfood]

To sum up:

When a bell tolls a death knell
Each knell's for one body
The death toll is the sum of knells
But only one's for thee.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Cylix]

If he had rephrased it to including, tolling I believe it would have fallen in the realm of acceptable or at least common place usage.

Of course if this goes on were going to be rephrased as simply trolling.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Bob Hearn]

Actually there are no less than five comma errors in that one summary. That's quite an accomplishment, but it's extremely painful to read!

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[sryx]

I think they meant Atom's Death Troll, as in all of the "Atom is dead" posts that will no doubt follow.
-Jason

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Takumi2501]

I guess so.

That's how I found the article. :P

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[flosofl]

Yeah, it should be "Atom's Death Knell".

It's almost as bad as people finding their "nitch" (AHHH!! It's "niche"!)

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[elliotCarte]

Wow, can I mod this down -1 toll?

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Daetrin]

Are you sure? The others are clearly wrong but i thought the second comma was acceptable. Of course my grammar knowledge is admitedly lax :)

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[NumbThumb]

Thank you.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[dingleberrie]

Actually, I think he meant to say that RSS was Atom's knell in the coffin. My spelling checker says that's correct.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Tim C]

The phrase death toll has a single, well-defined meaning. It does not mean the same as death knell, no matter that the individual word toll, in the context of bells, means the same as knell, in the same context.

For what it's worth (ie nothing), I've never heard the phrase "funeral toll" :)

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Bob Hearn]

Yeah - I'm counting the missing comma, as well as the extra comma, in "steered clear of endorsing the RSS specification hoping that Atom, would take hold".

We could be generous and just call that a misplaced comma, I suppose, but I could count more if I were really being nitpicky.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[tehshen]

If you post a grammar rant then you automatically include one mistake (it's like a law, or something).

"no fewer than"

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a nice niche for breakfast! With peppers, eggs, broccoli... It was good!

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[ArsSineArtificio]

Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.

Assuming your .sig is a pun on the nickname for a quarter, isn't a quarter two bits?

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[klept]

Jesus, who cares?

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[tehshen]

It is not a pun on anything; It is the JOKE command in the mac version of simcity2000, and the joke is meant to be on us (probably)

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[wdr1]

This is an ad, intended to drive site traffic. Not to say Hemos understood it to be as such, but it definitely is. (If you look at the "About us" on the feed page, you'll see that they also own "NotePage", the the site listed as the submitter's homepage.)

It's not so bad that this story was approved as an ad, but rather it's so poorly written and poorly understood by the author. After announcing support for RSS, MS's Longhorn team bent over backwards to explain that they were supporting Atom too. The rest of it really is a long winded way to say that part of Google started using RSS in addition to Atom (not instead of!). In fact, I've no idea what point he's even making with Blogger, as they continue to use Atom!

Give the utter crap of this post, the only thing that surprised me was that it was posted by timothy!

-Bill

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Anonymous Coward]

You're mistaking a grammatical error for use of a style that you don't approve of. The commas are grammatical errors, the use of "less" instead of "fewer" is a style issue.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[mr_tap]

Let's face it: the author meant to say "sounds the death knell" or "rings the death knell" or something to that effect, and just got it horribly, horribly wrong in his mind, likely using the same logic you did

I think that you have hit the hammer right between the eyes

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[HeroreV]

Even more obvious is that RSS' should be RSS's instead.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[Castar]

But only one's for thee.

Actually, each one is for thee, because the point of the original work is that humanity is interconnected, and each death affects each person. No man is an island!

Incidentally, I love the way Slashdot discussions cleave so closely to the topic at hand.

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[mikefe]

No, it's two bites.

Article from a biased company

[bigwavejas]

RSS may have won the Atom/RSS battle, but for Feedforall.com to make such matter-of-fact statements such as,

"Google's recent new service that allows web surfers to monitor Google News using either RSS or Atom feeds, appears to be an acknowledgment that perhaps in purchasing Blogger, they chose the wrong specification."

...When they're a company that exclusively promotes the use of RSS, it seems a bit self-righteous; moreover, presumptuous that Google is simply writing off Atom.

Re:Article from a biased company

[TheRaven64]

And didn't Atom recently become an official IETF standard? It seems a lot more of a win than being embedded in beta versions of Vista - it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS.

Re:Article from a biased company

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharon's name is linked to notepage.net, feedforall.com is owned by notepage, and her opinions on RSS and Atom are on the feedforall.com site. I smell a lotta self promotion going on. How much you wanna bet there'll be lots of bragging about how they got /.ed?

Re:Article from a biased company

[legirons]

" Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification"

{{npov}} {{cleanup}}

Re:Article from a biased company

[GreenHell]

Even better: when they're a company that exclusively promotes the use of RSS and they don't even have a valid RSS feed, it seems like a good reason to laugh at them.

Re:Article from a biased company

[His name cannot be s]

"When they're a company that exclusively promotes the use of RSS, it seems a bit self-righteous; moreover, presumptuous that Google is simply writing off Atom."

No kidding, given the rest of the facts:

Microsoft already stated that they would be using xml namespaces to add to RSS. Which is exactly what Dave Winer who published RSS 2.0 intended. Microsoft actually consulted Dave before getting very far too. Quote: "Anyway, there's a lot more to what they're doing, but I wanted to say in advance that I think what they're doing is cool. "

Additionally, Microsoft has stated support for Atom as well.

Heh.

Re:Article from a biased company

[hritcu]

You guys sound like Vista is going to ship sometime soon. I wonder if they will make it in 2006? 2007? Or MS fains will have to wait till 2008 to be able to run the newest and coolest windows. With MS-RSS support, of course.

Re:Article from a biased company

[jevvim]

And to top it off, the submitter's name links to NotePage, which operates the FeedForAll site as well. And yet, no "conflict of interest" warning from the submitter.

Re:Article from a biased company

[Seumas]

Wasn't there an article on Slashdot just a couple days ago about how even most webmasters and bloggers have no clue what RSS is? It was some amazing percentage that had never even heard of it. 66% or 80% or something.

And two days later, we go from "RSS has no mindshare and is dying" to "RSS is killing ATOM"?

Re:Article from a biased company

[utnow]

where's the registered trademark symbol? lol

Re:Article from a biased company

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

This is a paid advertisement posing as a legitimate Slashdot article. And the silence from Rob Malda continues...

Re:Article from a biased company

[Moofie]

Ummm...so?

Re:Article from a biased company

[frisket]

What's more interesting is that Atom is more robust and better designed than RSS, but it's being touted as the future of syndication by companies who don't have any significant background or experience in markup (and that includes Microsoft, of course, who still have a lot to learn).

This shouldn't really be too surprising, however, since Atom came from some one who knows a lot about markup, and RSS came from a group of people who hadn't a clue.

Re:Article from a biased company

[elemental23]

FYI, at Linuxworld SF a couple weeks ago CmdrTaco explicitely said that Slashdot does not accept paid advertising as stories. I asked him this question myself.

Re:Article from a biased company

[keytoe]

it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS

Internet Explorer 7 - Supports six syndication formats: RSS, Atom, Atom, RSS, Atom and RSS. That's twice as many as Safari!

Re:Article from a biased company

[masklinn]

Yes, and he obviously spoke truthfully, just as truthfully as GWB when he explained that Iraq had WMDs and that the war there would be done within 6 month...

Re:Article from a biased company

[elemental23]

He spoke candidly about everything else, and he didn't seem to be lying about this. He also thinks all the complaints about stuff like this are funny.

But hey, you don't have to take it from someone who was there, you're free to continue with your own theories.

Re:Article from a biased company

[JediJorgie]

Yea, Vista may not ship till 2007, but many folks are using IE7b today and it support RSS & ATOM.

Jorgie

Re:Article from a biased company

[mccoma]

The sad part is it is probably correct to repeat RSS multiple times.

Re:Article from a biased company

[bro1]

Windows Vista will definetely support Atom at least this is what Microsoft developers say. From Longohorn RSS team's blog:

That check-in completes Longhorn support for the different syndication formats. The grand total is: RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0.
However, just to set expectations, we locked down on Beta 1 of Longhorn about a month ago, so the release of Longhorn that will be public soon won't have Atom support, but the bits we'll have at PDC in September, and in Beta 2 will have it.

Re:Article from a biased company

[Cereal Box]

Boy, as much as you guys yell about Microsoft engaging in FUD, you have no problem making your own FUD against Microsoft.

Face it, Vista is in public beta, it's no longer years away. It's coming out in 2006. Get over it.

Re:Article from a biased company

[Xabraxas]

Face it, Vista is in public beta, it's no longer years away. It's coming out in 2006. Get over it.

Ha. Good luck. MS is known for their late releases. Ever hear of windows 97? Vista will come out in 2007. Get over it.

Re:Article from a biased company

[hritcu]

We will live and we will see. Not that I really care. It is obvious that many of the Vista features will be available for XP, making it even less likely for Vista to have a real impact even if it ships this year.

Re:Article from a biased company

[hritcu]

And before you dismiss this too as FUD, I will give you the links:
Windows Presentation Foundation: The framework and engine for unification: "[...] the Windows Presentation Foundation will be available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and all future releases of the Windows operating system."
Windows Communication Foundation: Taking Web services to the next level: "As a core pillar of Windows Vista and with support for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, Windows Communication Foundation will radically simplify how the next generation of connected systems is built on the Windows platform."

Re:Article from a biased company

[leshert]

Excise the word "paid". This is the poster getting free advertising, I think

Re:Article from a biased company

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh.

Please don't use that. It sounds dumb. If you're too chicken shit to type "hehe" because you think it'll sound girly, then don't try to indicate any amusement whatsoever, ok?

Re:Article from a biased company

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

Hmm, on the one hand I've got your word that Rob Malda said that to you and on the other hand, I've got a volume of stories just like this one...

I wonder which is more convincing? Ever think that Malda lied to you?

Re:Article from a biased company

[mikefe]

And everyone still ran Win98SE that came out in May 1999.

So if Microsoft follows their historical record, Vista has a good chance of coming out in the 2007-2009 range.

Re:Article from a biased company

[mikefe]

Yep, it's true since the version numbers were not handled in a sane way at all.

From Wikipedia:

• RSS 0.90 was the original Netscape RSS version. This RSS was called RDF Site Summary, but was based on an early working draft of the RDF standard, and was not compatible with the final RDF Recommendation.
• RSS 1.0 and 1.1 are an open format by the "RSS-DEV Working Group", again standing for RDF Site Summary. RSS 1.0 is an RDF format like RSS 0.90, but not fully compatible with it, since 1.0 is based on the final RDF 1.0 Recommendation.

The RSS 2.* branch (initially UserLand, now Harvard) includes the following versions:

• RSS 0.91 is the simplified RSS version released by Netscape, and also the version number of the simplified version championed by Dave Winer from Userland Software. The Netscape version was now called Rich Site Summary, this was no longer an RDF format, but was relatively easy to use. It remains the most common RSS variant.
• RSS 0.92 through 0.94 are expansions of the RSS 0.91 format, which are mostly compatible with each other and with Winer's version of RSS 0.91, but are not compatible with RSS 0.90. In all Userland RSS 0.9x specifications, RSS was no longer an acronym.
• RSS 2.0.1 has the internal version number 2.0. RSS 2.0.1 was proclaimed to be "frozen", but still updated shortly after release without changing the version number. RSS now stood for Really Simple Syndication. The major change in this version is an explicit extension mechanism using XML Namespaces.

Re:Article from a biased company

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what the second and third copies "Atom" refer to, but you actually need to add three more copies of "RSS".

MSRSS

[Langley]

Wan't Microsoft making noise a little while ago about adding some extensions to RSS. Isn't this the only reason they are including RSS in IE, not because of some heartwarming realization that no company is an island?

Re:MSRSS

[R2.0]

Next:

MSRSSIPPI: Don't know what it means, but I can spell it because it is catchy.

Re:MSRSS

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS has 2 things working against it, 1st is Dave Winer and the second is a Microsoft implementation. In an ideal world, the involvement of such unbalanced entities would be enough to sound the death of anything. **Sigh**

Atom spec may be a standards track but Microsoft's comming implementation will negate any advantages. This is why I'm going to start publishing my feeds in glorious, bandwidth-saving ASCII!

Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[team99parody]

I thought Microsoft endorsed their embraced and extended and renamed RSS. Seems like it's now not Atom vs RSS, but "Web Feeds" vs RSS.

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[savuporo]

Microsoft taking a perfectly good standard, "extending" it on their own and claiming it theirs ?
Why, but thats impossible, that has never happened before and could never happen !

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[Jugalator]

I thought Microsoft endorsed their embraced and extended and renamed RSS. Seems like it's now not Atom vs RSS, but "Web Feeds" vs RSS.

Err...

This just seem to be a rebranding like Firefox and "Live Bookmarks".

Numerous hints at it in the article too:

Because of this, its renaming of RSS is not a sign the company is trying to remake the technology for its own purposes but rather a way to make a distinction between RSS and a feature of IE.

Microsoft is adding RSS functionality to the next version of Windows, Windows Vista, primarily through the IE 7 version of its Web browser.

Of course, there's an RSS zealot saying this too:

"Like it or not Microsoft, the technology is called RSS. If you try to change that, for whatever reason, you will get routed around," wrote Winer, a software guru who is credited with pioneering RSS and other Web standards.

Did he complain as loudly when competing web browsers introduced RSS support under other names? Or is it a Microsoft thing... again? I must ask myself if he visits HTML pages or websites as well.

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[Midnight Thunder]

Microsoft is not the only one to embrace and extend. Apple seems to have done the same thing with the Podcast file spec (which is RSS based):

How To Publish a Podcast on the iTunes Music Store

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[JediJorgie]

1) They added one thing to RSS, the idea of ordered lists.. (AFIK there is no way in basic RSS to order items based on anything other then the date, but I could be wrong.)

2) They followed the defined rules for adding things to RSS which is designed to be extended.

3) They released thier changes under the same license that RSS was released under.

4) Unlike APPLE, they did not duplicate things that are already in RSS causing duplicate data in a valid client agnostic feed.

5) "Web Feeds" can be any current version of RSS or Atom, so they did NOT rename RSS they created an umbrella term. Unlike others, they use the RSS and ATOM terms properly and don't call all xml based feeds *RSS*.

Jorgie

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[michaeldot]

It's a bit different there. It is still the identical RSS 2.0 spec. They are just using a namespace to supply information that isn't otherwise available, such as duration, a subtitle and an "explicit" warning, which are handy (but optional) things to have.

Conventional RSS tags in Podcasts without these namespace tags work fine, just don't give the extra useful information.

The namespace allows delineation of info voluntarily added for the user's benefit. It hasn't altered the RSS 2.0 spec at all.

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[infoterror]

Don't tell me we've all forgotten AppleTalk so quickly?

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[Midnight Thunder]

Don't tell me we've all forgotten AppleTalk so quickly?

Just curious, but what's your point here. AppleTalk is an Apple protocol completely, available since around 1986.

Does netcraft confirm it?

[TheAvatar666]

We all know for a fact that if Netcraft doesn't confirm it, it is not dead, so let me repeat. Does netcraft confirm it?

Re:Does netcraft confirm it?

[iggymanz]

haha, netcraft provides email newsfeeds.

Re:Does netcraft confirm it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah ha! What you're saying is that Netcraft confirms that both RSS and Atom are dying!

doesnt matter what or why they have blogger

[solosaint]

so what, google has so much money to play with they could just buy another service, like xanga.. xanga.com/solosaint

Which RSS did Microsoft embrace?

[hta]

does anyone have real info on which version numbers of RSS (and according to whose spec) works with the Microsoft implementation?

Re:Which RSS did Microsoft embrace?

[vcv]

All of them. They also are going to support Atom.

Re:Which RSS did Microsoft embrace?

[Beale]

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

FUD, FUD, and more FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com/ software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts.

Wow. It's a marketing plant trumpeting that RSS is now the standard, made by a company that specialises in RSS feeds.

Re:FUD, FUD, and more FUD

[pokka]

So, is anyone from slashdot going to correct this story?

This was pure spam, published to sway public opinion in the Atom vs RSS debate, and despite the fact that they've been called out in the comments, their plan is going to work unless slashdot removes the story or substantially edits it to point out the fraud. It will appear in countless syndicated news feeds (in RSS or Atom, ha), in blogs referencing the post (by people who didn't read the comments and were therefore fooled). Google searches about Atom will bring up this story, etc.

I've seen countless fake stories posted to Slashdot, and they get the same (non-)treatment. Slashdot should really do a better job of filtering this stuff out *before* it's published, because - whether they realize it or not - it actually causes a lot of damage to the public's knowledge and understanding of technology. And it *is* partly Slashdot's fault, because it would take no longer than five minutes per story to verify that it is fundamentally valid (and maybe an extra five minutes to spell-check and remove sensationalistic text).

Re:FUD, FUD, and more FUD

[nine-times]

So to sum up:

A company that specialises in RSS feeds reports that RSS has conquered the last hurdle in becoming the industry syndication standard. The great victory of RSS over Atom consists in RSS being supported by Microsoft (who is also supporting Atom) as well as Google (who is also supporting Atom).

Way to crush the competition!

Re:FUD, FUD, and more FUD

[mrcparker]

Did the editors, or anybody posting, even read the article or even look at the web page the article was posted on? There is so much speculation being posted, and it is obvious no one reads the articles around here.

Wow, slashdot sucks. Good for the PR firm that got this posted - it should improve their site ranking.

microsoft is going to support ATOM too

[kard]

from:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/

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

What's with the bias?

[MagikSlinger]

That's hands down the most biased "news" posting I've seen on Slashdot... this month.

Re:What's with the bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an advertisement in disguise. If you click the name of the submitter you can see the software he's selling.

Re:What's with the bias?

[LnxAddct]

The submitter is the owner of a company specializing in RSS editing/creation software.
Regards,
Steve

Re:What's with the bias?

[Kelson]

Yeah, this is kind of like saying "Service providers are now offering Linux in addition to FreeBSD, therefore, BSD is dying."

WTF????

Crack monkey

[LordMyren]

You crack rock smoking monkey, only like .5% of the web denziens actually use some form of syndication. Most people havent the foggiest idea what RSS even is. So, MS puts RSS into IE: suddenly RSS is going to overrun atom? Somehow I think not.

IMO, atom is a far better protocol. The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards, v. RSS which basically gets as far as tag>. Its far more clear about its payload and is way better suited towards XML delivery. But, decide for yourself.

I see no problem with the current duality. I do wish Atom were available more places, but I can still live with RSS where I need to.

Myren

Re:Crack monkey

[cowscows]

I think the point is, the only thing that can beat a good buzz-word is a good buzz-acronym. Yeah, Atom...that sounds pretty cool. But RSS, holy crap, it must stand for something totally complex and awesome and revolutionary.

RSS. Just say it to yourself over and over again. It rolls off the tongue. Next to a well designed acronym such as that, Atom just seems really simple.

Re:Crack monkey

[bloodstar]

IMO, atom is a far better protocol. The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards, v. RSS which basically gets as far as tag>. Its far more clear about its payload and is way better suited towards XML delivery.

Better? Perhaps, but then again, so was Beta. And we all know how Beta fared against VHS.

Re:Crack monkey

[FLEB]

RSS. Just say it to yourself over and over again. It rolls off the tongue.

"Arses?"

Re:Crack monkey

[JoseFilipe]

Unfortunately, most of the times the best format doesn't win.
It's the industry backing that counts.

Re:Crack monkey

[Feneric]

The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards

I'd say that's also true with RSS 1.0 with its RDF base.

Re:Crack monkey

[Anonymous Coward]

The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards

I'd say that's also true with RSS 1.0 with its RDF base.

Except that RSS failed and Atom succeeded. RSS was designed with an XML-like syntax without anyone bothering to understand XML. So plenty of valid RSS documents are malformed XML, which means you can't use standard XML tools to process them.

In other words, RSS is a crufty piece of crap.

Re:Crack monkey

[LordMyren]

I dont think its necessarily so winner take all. Parituclarly in cases like this; the only real difference for implementors is which perl engine to glue on the front of their CMS. If you're actually doing real XML syndication, you'll probably be using Atom anyways.

Stepping out on a ledge here, but I'd wager most developers havent had very intimate encounters with XML, far fewer data distribution. But future informational and database systems will be built around these cores. Here's where the difference becomes razor apparent: RSS is basically a cute tool for article syndication, but Atom is designed to syndicate most any XML data.

I fear the tool developers will be victim to the buzz here: they'll WANT to use Atom, just as Google refused to offer anything else for a while, but the market will demand RSS because its a cool acronym. Still, I've some hope that eventualyl when the XML really starts flowing, RSS will become a footnote joke and Atom v10.2 will have all the XML^2 goodness our solar system needs.

So really, its much worse: the actual industry building the technologies are slave to the PR machines consuming them. Fuck that noise. :/

Myren

Never mind that, look how low your ID is :-o

[Low Slashdot ID Guy!]

Honestly who cares about atom/schmatom when you've got an ID like yours.

Re:Never mind that, look how low your ID is :-o

[Langley]

Its nothing really, I simply cracked the odometer open and rolled back the digits, or maybe I ran the car in reverse for some time, I don't quite remember it was so long ago.

Google

[gkozlyk]

With an extra $4 Billion I guess Google can go purchase another company like M$ does.

The trend of RSS vs Atom doesn't seem too surprising with the popularity rise of RSS feeds, viewers and general content from the major news and tech sites.

Shameless advert, and fud fud fud

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, no one is going to buy your $40 RSS reader....so stop trying to spead fud to increase your sales. How much do slashdot charge for shameless advertising?

Much ado about nothing

[winkydink]

As you point out, only a tiny percentage of users actually use some form of syndication. Doesn't this really boil down to, "who cares?"

Re:Much ado about nothing

[gbjbaanb]

today, a tiny percentage who don't care.. tomorrow the biggest thing in internet publishing paradigms since the invention of the carrier pigeon!

Re:Much ado about nothing

[LordMyren]

Perhaps you missed the subtitle: "news for NERDS. Stuff that matters".

Syndication technologies are excellent tools for developers. Existing code to build servers from, existing code for clients. Well built durable standards, &c &c. The whole web services thing, yada yada, open access to data, free information, blah blah.

The GOAL is that through careful coding eventually we can boil it all down to "who cares", but we're a long way off having developed the proper environment for our information for that to be the case. Infrastructure, infrastructure infrastructure.

I maintain my original stance.
- Myren

Formats don't die

[mveloso]

Old formats don't die, they just go into maintenance mode.

Saying one format or another has won is always premature. The only time it's safe to say that a format is dead is when they have to build new equipment to read it because the hardware is missing. And even then you never know.

This article is obviously biased. It's like when Netscape said "the desktop is dead" when the Java plugin was first released.

Re:Formats don't die

[TigerTale]

Old formats don't die, they just go into maintenance mode.

Which is why I expect that, any day now, I will start regretting that I threw away my Betamax player a couple of years ago...

Re:Formats don't die

[timster121]

The only time it's safe to say that a format is dead is when they have to build new equipment to read it because the hardware is missing.

Nah. The easier solution is to just go back in time and pickup a machine that can read it.



(for those who didn't get the reference: john titor)

Is that so?

[savala]

Strange that...

Windows Vista will support all common RSS formats, including: RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3. We will support Atom 1.0 when it's released.

source: msdn.microsoft.com

Re:Is that so?

[Nuclear Elephant]

Windows Vista will support all common RSS formats, including: RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3. We will support Atom 1.0 when it's released.

In an attempt to meet deadline, the revised version now reads:

Windows Vista will support [snip snip] RSS [snip snip] with a patch made available in Service Pack 1.

Re:Is that so?

[Brandybuck]

These specifications are light enough, that not including support for both is misguided. Why piss off all your Atom users when they're so cheap to support? I think this attempt to make RSS vs. Atom into the next religious war is silly.

Re:Is that so?

[masklinn]

AFAIK RSS/ATOM is already a religious war being fought right now.

Articles, with extra, commas

[blueZ3]

are, frequently posted, on slashdot. They, often amuse, me.

Re:Articles, with extra, commas

[Anonymous Coward]

It would seem, that some people, put commas when they pause typing, instead of where the reader should pause, while reading.

Of course, if I,, did, that, my, sentences,, would,,, look,,,,like,,this, .,

Re:Articles, with extra, commas

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the submitter must have mod points. Anyone who criticizes the commas is getting modded offtopic. =P

Re:Articles, with extra, commas

[TheSpoom]

Mr. Shatner, I didn't know you posted on Slashdot! Can I have your autograph?

RSS vs. ATOM

[digitalgimpus]

I've seen people in both camps, but have yet to see a true pro/con list for each. Anyone care to share?

I've implemented RSS before, never bothered with ATOM, since RSS seems to be better supported client side.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of each standard?

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[metamatic]

RSS has 11 different varieties, 9 if you exclude the two attempts at an "RSS 3". Atom has a single variety.

RSS 1.0 has a way to include HTML in the feed. RSS 2.0 doesn't. Atom does, and also supports XHTML.

RSS 1.0 is extensible in a standard way via namespaces. RSS 2.0 is extended via ad-hoc additions. Atom is extensible via namespaces.

Atom is more complicated than RSS 1.0, which is more complicated than RSS 2.0.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[LionKimbro]

It doesn't really matter.

Really, it doesn't. It's like picking what color wire you want.

That said: ATOM specifies a bunch of stuff about how to publish entries and stuff.

It's working it's way through the IETF, if I understand right.

Basically, serious net work is going into Atom. I strongly suspect I'll be using it in the near future.

But again, it hardly matters at all. There are tons of tools that accept and publish everything.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[hritcu]

RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, Compared

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[Wesley Felter]

Atom has two versions: 0.3 and 1.0 (not counting any intermediate drafts that people may have hacked up support for and then forgotten about).

People include HTML in RSS 2.0 feeds all the time. Escaped markup may be gross, but people use it.

Likewise, most RSS 2.0 extensions seem to use namespaces.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[Isofarro]

RSS 1.0 is extensible in a standard way via namespaces. RSS 2.0 is extended via ad-hoc additions. Atom is extensible via namespaces.

The backbone on RSS1.0 extensibility is namespaces _and_ RDF, in that it can be merged with any other RDF vocabularies.

RSS2.0 is extensible via namespaces. For example, Microsoft's Simple List Extension to RSS 2.0.

Atom is more complicated than RSS 1.0, which is more complicated than RSS 2.0.

I don't know how you've come to the conclusion that Atom is more complicated than RSS1.0, other than to say that you'd be the first person I've ever seen saying that.

RSS2.0 is simple up to a point - for instance if you are publishing plain text entries with no angle brackets then you should be okay (or if you don't mind silent data loss). If you want to mark up your content with XHTML, with RSS2.0 you are out of luck unless you define an extension, and then hope aggregator developers pick up on it and implement it.

Atom cleanly specifies how to have content as plain text, HTML, XHTML, XML, or even a different media format altogether. RSS2.0 leaves you with plain text, or HTML.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[Isofarro]

It's working it's way through the IETF, if I understand right.

The Atom Syndication Format - the feed format - got signed off as a Proposed Standard last week. That means the RFC number is on the way. Its here. The publishing protocol still has some way to go yet.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullcrap

All of RSS's 9 varieties are so similar they can easily be parsed by a single parser.

Atom has currently two varieties: 0.3 (widely used, though deprecated and denounced) and 1.0 (official IETF standard, but not very widely used yet). As with RSS's varieties, these are also not strictly compatible, though are easily parsed by the same code.

Both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 support HTML natively and support XHTML through extensions.

RSS 2.0 is extensible through namespaces just like RSS 1.0 and ATOM.

RSS 1.0 is based on RDF, making it IMHO more complicated than both Atom and RSS 2.0.

Atom is much better defined than RSS.

A good (though slightly biased) overview of the differences between Atom and RSS can be found here.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[metamatic]

Bullcrap. RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 have no way to indicate whether content is HTML or text, so they do not support HTML.

Sure, some people shove HTML in the text elements, and some feed readers sniff the text to see if it looks like HTML, but that's a long way from saying the format supports it.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[metamatic]

I don't know how you've come to the conclusion that Atom is more complicated than RSS1.0

By implementing parsers for both.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[TPx]

>RSS has 11 different varieties, 9 if you exclude the two attempts at an "RSS 3". Atom has a single variety.

If you count Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 a "single variety", then yes.

>RSS 1.0 has a way to include HTML in the feed. RSS 2.0 doesn't. Atom does, and also supports XHTML

RSS 2.0 can include HTML in feeds just fine. That's how the Metaweblog API are implemented, btw.

>RSS 1.0 is extensible in a standard way via namespaces. RSS 2.0 is extended via ad-hoc additions. Atom is extensible via namespaces.

RSS 2.0 is perfectly extensible via namespaces, like iTunes did. As an aside, that's the only way RSS can be extended, short of completely ignoring the spec.

>Atom is more complicated than RSS 1.0, which is more complicated than RSS 2.0.

For you, maybe. All of them are fairly simple to implement for any programmer that doesn't flip burgers during his workday.

But hey, four sentences, four mistakes. You almost beat the original topic in wrongness!

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[metamatic]

With no indication of the type of the textual data in description elements, the only way to include HTML in RSS is to assume that the reader will sniff for HTML by looking at the contents and guessing the data type. Any programmer who's not an inexperienced hack will realize that's not a good idea.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[hutteman]

From the RSS 2.0 spec:

A channel may contain any number of <item>s. An item may represent a "story" -- much like a story in a newspaper or magazine; if so its description is a synopsis of the story, and the link points to the full story. An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text ( entity-encoded HTML is allowed ; see examples), and the link and title may be omitted. All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present.

sounds like support to me...

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[metamatic]

The problem is how you tell whether something is encoded HTML or not. As I've said elsewhere, sniffing the content is not a good solution.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[Isofarro]

By implementing parsers for both.

Can you show me your RDF parser? The extension handling mechanism is something I'm having a lot of problems getting my head around.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[Isofarro]

RSS 2.0 can include HTML in feeds just fine.

Not without the RSS parser needing to guess whether the content is plain text or html. The existence of a less than sign or greater than sign is not a definitive sign that the content is HTML. The RSS2.0 specification makes no mention of how to handle content - it might be text, or it might be HTML (sorry, no XHTML).

When your parsing the feed and the content contains the following:

Todays topic is the &lt;br&gt; tag which forms the cornerstone of HTML.

Is the content to be treated as plain text, or as HTML? Its very difficult to know, and even today RSS2.0 gives no way of allowing the author to specify. The aggregator has to guess. With Reuters, aggregators guessed wrongly.

Re:RSS vs. ATOM

[metamatic]

Extensions aren't too hard. Feedparser shows the way to do it--keep a list of known namespace declaration URLs. Then when you hit an xmlns declaration, you record the prefix they specify, and the standard one you prefer, in a hash.

Once you've done that, you just need to preprocess every XML element by mapping the namespaces through the hash to standardize them. I then map the namespaced element to an object field by converting the : to an _.

well...

[DarkLox]

When GoogleOS comes out, and they buy out Microsoft and Atom will live again

Who Cares?

[WombatControl]

To be honest, the RSS vs. Atom thing is a lot like DVD+R and DVD-R - at this point they might as well be interchangeable.

Just about every feed parser handles both Atom and RSS feeds. Using a tool like Magpie RSS (PHP) or the Universal Feed Parser (Python) the format of any given feed is entirely transparent to application developers. RSS 1.0? RSS 2.0? Atom 0.3? It all gets processed by the parser in a nearly identical way.

Already tools like Movable Type/Typepad or WordPress generate both RSS and Atom feeds by default. The vast majority of users don't know and don't care which feed format they're reading so long as it works. Both the toolkits and the applications use both formats and there's really little reason why they can't continue to support both.

There doesn't have to be a single "winner" in the syndication feed wars. Atom and RSS can exist together for some time, and arguing that this is a zero-sum game in which one and only one feed format can exist is ridiculous. As long as the difference is transparent to end users, and relatively transparent to developers, neither format will totally conquer the other.

Re:Who Cares?

[metamatic]

Well, developers care, because the RSS specs (all nine different ones) are a mess, whereas Atom is quite carefully specified. RSS has the same problems as "Netscape HTML", whereas Atom is more like XHTML.

Re:Who Cares?

[Brandybuck]

Then why not use a feed parser as the GP suggested?

Re:Who Cares?

[m50d]

In that case long live RSS. This whole XHTML/CSS thing is what killed the web.

Re:Who Cares?

[dnorman]

Exactly! It's trivial to support various formats, or flavours of formats (rss 0.91, 1.0, 2.0), that it really doesn't matter. It's not like anyone supports one at the expense of any other format/flavour.

And, really, to the end user this should all be transparent infrastructure stuff. That's like saying a person gives two shits if they're viewing a web site in HTTP 1.0 or 1.1, or I suppose a more accurate comparison would be XHTML-Strict vs Transitional vs HTML 4. Sure, there are arguments to be made for any of them, but they all work...

Re:Who Cares?

[CRCulver]

This whole XHTML/CSS thing is what killed the web.

Explain.

Re:Who Cares?

[elemental23]

m50d confirms it, the web is dying.

I sure am glad you told us or I might never have noticed it!

Re:Who Cares?

[metamatic]

Someone has to implement the feed parser. Those people, i.e. developers, care.

Re:Who Cares?

[hritcu]

It's not like anyone supports one at the expense of any other format/flavour.
I'm dying to see a website that supports all the nine incompatible RSS versions + RSS 3.0 + ATOM. Well ... you can always be the first to do it.

The truth is that supporting one or two formats will always be done in at the expense of all the other "flavors". The real problem with RSS is really not technical, rather "administrative". Who can convince this guy that the world would be better off without his new and incompatible RSS version? Nobody (not even Microsoft :D ) will ever keep up with every guy deciding to write the next RSS version. This is why ATOM is so cool with IETF tailoring its specification. This assures that the new versions will be coherent and (as much as possible) backwards compatible. RSS vs ATOM is really like pre-W3C-HTML vs HTML 4. Yes, W3C released other specifications (XHTML) but they were never ment to make HTML 4 obsolete. Nothing could.

Re:Who Cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS 1.0 is very clearly specified and there's a site dedicated to covering the standard. I implemented an an RSS 1.0-based web site creation tool in like a week.

Atom is for people that missed the RSS 1.0 bus and want to feel important.

Re:Who Cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

It made the MS Frontpage users look stupid

Re:Who Cares?

[hutteman]

I agree Atom is much better specified than RSS, and would love to see it completely replace RSS, but that's not going to happen any time soon (or ever most likely)

So from a developer's perspective, we now have yet one more format to support (or 2 if you go by your logic and count RSS as 9)

How exactly does this help developers?

Re:Who Cares?

[m50d]

It has meant that professionals and big companies are better at producing good websites. Gone is the time when a typical kid in a bedroom would have written the best website on a particular subject, probably hand-coded and hosted on geocities. Now you find a big corporate site to tell you what you need to know, just like any other medium. The web used to be different.

Re:Who Cares?

[m50d]

Not dying, dead. I suppose I should have done the whole thing about internet share being down, red ink flowing like blood and so forth, but I couldn't be bothered.

Re:Who Cares?

[CRCulver]

Well, I'm sure the blind are happy that those "big evil corporations" are at least doing something to make their screenreaders work. And as a normal joe who doesn't work in the IT industry, I've been able to create and maintain an XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2-compliant site for over two years now. It's not that hard.

Re:Who Cares?

[m50d]

Well, I'm sure the blind are happy that those "big evil corporations" are at least doing something to make their screenreaders work.

Stripping the tags from a web page is easy as pie and doing so while keeping the formatting only slightly less so, so I can't see why screenreaders would have problems with normal html.

And as a normal joe who doesn't work in the IT industry, I've been able to create and maintain an XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2-compliant site for over two years now. It's not that hard.

I program fine and I've just found it impossible. But it could just be me.

Re:Who Cares?

[dnorman]

I wasn't very clear with what I meant...

"feed" publishers will likely select a subset of feed formats (perhaps a single format) to implement in their CMS or whatever.

"feed" readers/aggregators will have to be able to understand all flavours, so it really doesn't matter what flavour a publisher chooses. Pick the right one for the job. Want a lightweight feed? rss 0.91 would do... Want enclosures? RSS 2.0... Leave it to the reader/aggregator to understand all feed formats (as they all do now), and it becomes largely irrelevant which format/flavour is chosen by a publisher.

BFD

[scovetta]

Atom is an export format, right? So is rss. They're a little different. So someone at the Googleplex needs to write blog2rss.py and they can get rid of blog2atom.py.

Or does Atom have something to do with the way the data is stored internally? And I think Google did pretty well with Blogger-- it's like saying, "Google chose wrong when they bought Blogger, because Blogger used a different stylesheet on their home page than Google does."

Isn't this cute ... but it's wrong!!!

[hritcu]

RSS with its 9+1 incompatible versions is hardly a standard for anything. It is a huge pain for a implementer to decide which versions to support. Microsoft decided to support (one version of) RSS for now because it has been around for longer and we know how reticent is Microsoft to everythig new. So, for Microsot, RSS is of course better then nothing.

However, it is just wrong to say that the format war is over and RSS has won. Atom is a coherent standard now being finished under the umbrella of the IETF , and it is just now just starting to catch. And it will, because many of us have had enough RSS bullshit. We already had a disscussion with the guy behind RSS 3.0 which convinced me that with guys like him writing the RSS specs (just for the love of writing), RSS is REALLY DOOMED.

Re:Isn't this cute ... but it's wrong!!!

[earthbound kid]

Props for the 2 Stupid Dogs quote, yo.

"So, I said to him... Hey man, that's my ear! Can you believe it?"

Information on the Author/Submitter.

[magicchex]

Taken from the bottom of the article:

About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com/ software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for FeedForDev http://www.feedfordev.com/ an RSS component for developers. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net/ a wireless text messaging software company.

Needless to say, submitting your own obviously biased, commercially inspired, and untrue article is a tad transparent, but what do I know?

Re:Information on the Author/Submitter.

[AVIDJockey]

She, or others associated with feedforall.com, have a history of posting articles like this one that indirectly shill their services.

Re:Information on the Author/Submitter.

[delete]

Can somebody mod up the parent? The submitter's last article was also a PR stunt. As this comment summarises it, it's an article on how RSS is the future of business communication, hosted on a site that sells business RSS services, written by the site's owner, and submitted to Slashdot by the author.

Seriously, does anybody actually vet these articles?

Re:Information on the Author/Submitter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I understand that the approval of the editors Jackson, Franklin, and Grant are required to post these ads^H^H^H articles.

Re:Information on the Author/Submitter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Submitting your own biased, commercially inspired, and untrue article: transparent.

Creating a headline that makes English majors cry: priceless.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls,

[cwmitchell]

It tolls for thee I guess John Donne was a grammatically incorrect Slashdot editor as well.

Re:Ask not for whom the bell tolls,

[cwmitchell]

As much as I hate to try to educate someone so obviously well versed in the area, I'm going to anyway. The bell that Donne mentions in the poem refers to the church bells that would sound when someone was laid to rest. Hence the Death bell. Hence the tolling of the Death bell. You see where I'm going with this...

smartass

[l3v1]

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

Yup, I have nothing more to add besides: smartass.

Ok, just one more thing: for such smartasses managed MS to be where it is by acting as it acted along the last two decades. Like "ms does it so it is the good thing, everything else sucks". Zealotry school.

commas

[samkass]

That article, was difficult, to read, between all the, commas.

RSS man

[thermostat42]

RSS man, RSS man,
RSS man hates Atom man,
They have a fight, RSS wins.
RSS man.

Re:RSS man

[Just Some Guy]

You just can't go wrong quoting TMBG on Slashdot. That's nice; none of my "normal" friends have heard of them.

Captain Obvious

[Red Flayer]

Breaking news, RSS is favored by industry giants! Use RSS, support for Atom is disappearing!

Oh, and by the way, we happen to produce software to manage your RSS needs!

"Now that Atom's attempt at replacing RSS has fallen flat, the syndication arena will likely see significant innovation and progress."

Yes, that's what competition does, it stifles innovation.

Seriously, though, uniform standards can be great, saving dev time for loads of people and companies.

But I'd say that, at the very least, this promotional material (that's what it is) is putting the cart before the horse, and is also poorly written. I'd like to read a detailed analysis by an industry expert (not a marketing department), who is qualified to project market share for the standards.

Also: Google's recent new service that allows web surfers to monitor Google News using either RSS or Atom feeds, appears to be an acknowledgment that perhaps in purchasing Blogger, they chose the wrong specification.

Actually, this appears to be an acknowledgement that (1) Google would like as many consumers as possible to use Google News and (2) Google is choosing not to use their market share to lock out competitors in related products.

RSS victory independent of Longhorn

[Anonymous Coward]

A possible victory of RSS over Atom has not much to do with Microsoft's Vista/Longhorn software and which one of the two standards it uses. It is the other way around meaning that if Microsoft wants people to actually use their Vista OS support of standards is a necessary condition.

Tim Bray: RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared

[otisg]

RSS indeed dominates the feed scene, but Atom 1.0 has just been reviewed and approved by the Atompub Working Group (part of IETF, the same group that standardized HTTP, SMTP, and many other RFCs).

Thus, I wouldn't be so quick to claim RSS' victory. Tim Bray is a big supporter of Atom, and here is recent report titled RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared. Over at Simpy (feel free to use demo/demo account if you don't have an account yet), I am happily supporting RSS and Atom (as well as RDF).

I believe Atom also has the "push" component, and not just "pull" that RSS has. That is, I believe Atom spec contains specification of Atom as a way for making requests to web services, while RSS, I think, only lets you publish the data passively, and have clients actively pull it.
I can't find good references to this now, but maybe somebody else can find them and reply to this thread.

then it's official...

[-DeeT]

Let's call it the "Longhorn Shoehorn".

-DeeT

Big win for RSS

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I know Sun thought that Microsoft's adoption of Java was A Big Win, too.

Re:Big win for RSS

[Pharcae]

Am I the only one that finds it funny that RSS is the industry "standard" when there are atleast 11 different revisions of it around, while there are only one variant of Atom?

A better question is:

[Marc2k]

What is RMS' death toll?

I'd imagine he's got some seriouslykiller funk surrounding him, Free Software evangelists don't have time to shower, y'know.

Microsoft view of "innovation"?

[cahiha]

Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification. [...] Now that Atom's attempt at replacing RSS has fallen flat, the syndication arena will likely see significant innovation and progress.

I suppose that's the usual Microsoft view, which means that we can only have innovation once Microsoft has moved and picked a standard that's substantially inferior to the state of the art.

I mean, the differences between RSS and Atom aren't that big (they are both XML), but within those constraints, RSS still manages to get a bunch of things wrong relative to Atom (see here for a discussion).

Here's why RSS won

[atomm1024]

When ever there's a technical niche to be filled, then given a set of possible candidates, costing equally as much (resource- and price-wise) to use, and having approximately equal functionality, the first one to become widely used will probably stay widely used, unless a future competitor has very important technical merits that can not be back-ported to the existing system.

Actually, everything I said there is basically common sense, but said in a particularly fancy way. RSS wins because it was the first to become widely used, and for the huge majority of uses (millions of random users with their feed-readers), switching to Atom would just break compatibility and offer no technical merits. Why is it any wonder that RSS won?

And by technical merits, I mean those observable to normal users. If J. Random Blogger can't see how switching to Atom makes things better, then why would he do it? Maybe the underlying architecture of Atom is much better. (I don't know; I haven't actually read an explanation of its improvements, aside from being standardized.) But if the RSS feeds of the present work just fine, which they do, then nobody's going to switch. I mean, if the Internet community made their protocol/format choices solely on technical merit, then not only would JSON-RPC have superseded XML-RPC, but I should also think thatwe'd be using a variant of Aaron Swartz's RSS 3.0 instead of the XML-based formats by now. It would save bandwidth, make it easier for humans to read and write feeds, and make it easier to parse and generate. (Yes, to parse it you'll have to write a a few custom regexes or something, but you won't need to include a 3MB XML-parsing library.) And we wouldn't need to worry about internationalisation issues like encoding, because RSS 3.0 feeds are UTF-8 by definition. Unfortunately, this is not about technical merits, just like capitalistic competition is never entirely about offering higher-quality goods or services. It's all about marketing, really -- marketing just enough for your product to get a foothold.

Google didn't choose the "wrong" specification. They chose a doomed one, maybe, but that doesn't make it bad.

Re:Here's why RSS won

[WombatControl]

Let's assume RSS "won" something. (Which in itself is baloney - Atom is still very much around and well-supported.)

Which RSS "won"? RSS 2.0? RSS 1.0? RSS 0.91? Any of the 9 different incompatible versions of RSS?

There's a reason why non-XML formats like JSON-RPC and RSS3.0 never caught on - it's because they're not based on XML. XML, for all its shortcomings, is supported by damn near everything under the sun. You can query it with XPath, transform it back into XHTML with XSTL, slice it, dice it, and turn it into delicious Julienne fries. XML is the information interchange format right now, and that's why formats that aren't based off of valid XML schemas are pretty much doomed to failure.

Atom has the backing of the IETF. Every toolkit on the planet supports Atom - as will Vista. RSS won't be going away, but saying one format or another will "win" is assuming that this is a zero-sum game when it really isn't.

The real battle was between XML formats and non-XML formats, and the non-XML formats like Netscape's old versions of RDF died out a long time ago.

Re:Here's why RSS won

[masklinn]

transform it back into XHTML with XSTL

Which you usually don't do (unless you're writing a web-based feedreader), but the ability to create both the web page (XHTML) and feed (RSS/Atom) from the XML templating simply by applying a different XSL is, on the other hand, very pleasing.

Re:Here's why RSS won

[smallpaul]

You know that RSS 3.0 is a joke, right?

Re:Here's why RSS won

[atomm1024]

Of course I do. That was very obvious from his weblog entry announcing it. But that doesn't mean it's not a better format, or that it couldn't be made into a format better than the various XML-based RSSes.

He Won?

[LazloTheDog]

I, for one, had gotten fed up with the fanatic ramblings of this RSS guy and thought most others had also. And now you tell me he has won and M$ and Google are buying into it!

JM

Ask Slashdot: Easy RSS?

[kisrael]

I have a homebrew-ed backend weblog, http://kisrael.com/

I know RSS has forked, and I don't use it much myself but I know others have asked for an RSS feed...is there a simple guide to outputting my content in an RSS kind of way?

Also, if I wanted to mirror my content on an LJ, would it be easier to automate the LJ postings and get an RSS feed off of that, or vice versa, or are they completely indpendent tasks?

Re:Ask Slashdot: Easy RSS?

[omega_cubed]

I also wrote my own weblog software... completely in BASH. After I recently got a LiveJournal Account, I've been thinking about coordinating the two.

From what I've seen, it would be best to just mirror the contents directly: LiveJournal has exceedingly well community support in terms of OSS clients for posting/archiving/more. Personally, I use Charm, which is written in python, and has a filter-mode so that I can just pipe my post to Charm and it gets on LJ.

W

Re:Ask Slashdot: Easy RSS?

[slim]

If you're not prepared to do it properly with an XML library, then:

Grab somebody else's RSS feed.
Look at it -- the meaning will be immediately obvious.
Replace their variable content with template placeholders.
Write code to place your content in the template.
Have this run whenever you post, placing the output at a static HTML page on your site.

Or, give up on your homebrew blog code, and become a WordPress hacker.

Follow the registrants...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and you'll see this is nothing more than a typical Slashvertisement.

"S. Housley (notepage.net) writes..."

notepage.net
Registrant:
NOTEPAGE, INC.
291 Rockand St, Suite 13
HANOVER, MA 02339 US

"...RSS appears to have conquered the last hurdle (feedforall.com)..."

feedforall.com
Registrant:
NOTEPAGE, INC.
291 Rockand St, Suite 13
HANOVER, MA 02339 US

Well played/paid, editors!

Bias

[slapout]

RSS will be in Longhorn

Yeah, because there's absolutely no possibilty that someone will write a program for Longhorn(Vista) that will support Atom.

Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification

I guess because Microsoft declares something, that's it. Everyone else should just pack up and go home. (Someone should be sure to tell those Firefox people that Firefox isn't going to be on the Vista install CD!)

I don't have a dog in this fight, but this story seems to have a bias.

Re:Bias

[Kelson]

Yeah, because there's absolutely no possibilty that someone will write a program for Longhorn(Vista) that will support Atom.

(Picking up where the first set of sarcasm left off...)

None whatsoever. Not even Microsoft will touch it. Oh, wait!

For those who'd rather not read the article, it's from the Longhorn RSS team blog, and it's titled "Longhorn (hearts) Atom, too."

Move along... nothing to see here.

[burtonator]

This is such a non story. There are so many reasons that MS would want Atom I can't even begin to imagine Atom not taking over the world in the next year:

http://www.feedblog.org/2005/08/long_live_atom.htm l

What's this RSS' thing?

[iabervon]

I know there's a lot of contention over RSS version numbers, where they aren't necessarily in order or unique, but an "RSS prime" just seems excessively confusing.

(Actually, this is clearly the regular possessive of RSS, which is, I suppose, plural)

Re:What's this RSS' thing?

[Thundersnatch]

Oh, no. Now you've done it.

Right now there is some slashdot-reading marketing drone at MS thinking about how great C' sounds -- you know, because everyone knows that prime steaks are better than sharp cheese.

Why was this posted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this Slashdot's clever attempt at bypassing Adblock by disguising an advertisement as a story?

Good job editors, your standards improve on a daily basis.

Poor dying Google...

[Just Some Guy]

Google had previously acquired Blogger, a popular blogging tool that uses the Atom specification to syndicate the contents of blogs created on the Blogger platform.

...and we all know that Google's poor, beleaguered programmers will be incapable of altering the source of the application they own to transmit two. different. formats! of syndication data. That'd be like expecting them to support multiple locales or offer some kind of an aggregated news service. Why, oh why, must we constantly demand the impossible of our heroes?

Or they could just let an intern hack something up one weekend. Either way.

Atom is more than a feed format

[joeykiller]

It's worth noting that Atom is more than RSS is, in that it is also a push/publication format. You can use Atom to post to your blog; you can use it to upload pictures and files, delete postings, etc. It's quite possible that the two formats could continue to co-exists peacefully, merely because they fill different functions.

Re:Atom is more than a feed format

[phlako66]

definitely worth noting! ... I think that Atom may well survive in areas where such 2 way functionality is required, not just one way syndication. i work in elearning and many people think Atom is potentially a great tool for the next-generation learning environment where students can post to discussion forums, blogs, etc using Atom.

Re:Atom is more than a feed format

[JPriest]

Does also push/publication format also make it a greater security thread? Does it add additional overhead to dynamicially support it rather than RSS?

Who cares, they both suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeeze, this is all so silly.

They are both XML formats which means:

1) they suck big time. Datetime representation confusion, encoding confusion, verbosity and wasted bandwith, needless parser complexity, poorly-defined schemas, both Atom and RSS gives you all that fun stuff.

2) One can be transformed into the other. Ignoring any schema problems that come with point #1, you can always load an RSS feed and transform it to Atom or vice-versa.

Personally I'm fine with RSS. Although there are some things that bug me, such as biCapital tag names like pubDate, and use of an ambiguous, hard-to-remember non-ISO datetime format, it'll do. Atom brings nothing to the table except vague promises of "technical superiority" (?).

This is the same kind of childish infighting that plagues all "intellectual" movements. Like BSD vs. GPL or crap like that. It doesn't matter! Average Joe doesn't give two shits! Just focus on the big picture, or while you're fighting, Microsoft will swoop in and fuck over everybody.

Re:Who cares, they both suck.

[CRCulver]

Datetime representation

You've never heard of ISO 8601?

encoding confusion

XML is UTF-8 by default unless another encoding is explicitly given in the first line.

verbosity and wasted bandwith

HTTP is compressed by default. XML, being so redundant with all of its angle brackets, quotes, and equals signs, compresses very well indeed.

Re:Who cares, they both suck.

[slim]

You've never heard of ISO 8601?

When I first wrote an RSS generator, I was gutted to discover that the specification wanted RFC822 dates -- and the parser I was testing on required this.

It looks as if ISO8601 has won out though -- if I pick an arbitrary feed I see ISO8601 dates. Has the spec changed?

(for the puzzled, RFC822 is "Sat, 06 Jan 2000 12:00:00 GMT" -- hassle to build, hassle to machine-read. ISO8601 is "2000-01-06T12:00:00" -- much better.)

Re:Who cares, they both suck.

[am 2k]

if I pick an arbitrary feed I see ISO8601 dates. Has the spec changed?

No, most are no longer using pubDate now, an extension (Doublin Core) is used instead (that's why the tag name is "dc:date"). If anybody puts an ISO8601 date into pubDate, he deserves to be shot (yes, I had to write a parser for RSS).

Formats don't die ... they get upgraded

[hritcu]

For example RSS is being upgraded even at this moment.

(-1, ModWhine)

[Anonymous Coward]

TIA.

What a troll

[Lac]

The submitter seems to think that Google bought Blogger because it uses Atom for feeds. Clue: I bet its market share was more of a selling point. Additional clue: adding rss feeds to blogger is probably (a) easy and (b) completely non-controversial to anyone remotely sane.

Irony...

[iamlucky13]

Sure, I hear words like "arses" roll off people's tongues all the time.

I also like the GP's suggestion that an acronym like RSS sounds complex: really simple syndication. Complex and simple wouldn't happen to be antonyms, would they?

And I love the way the GGP called the submitter a "crack rock smoking monkey" and got modded +4: insightful. Not that it was a bad post. It seems the nazi mods missed it, is all.

Re:Irony...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, I hear words like "arses" roll off people's tongues all the time.

I like to have my tongue roll off people's arses. That's pretty similar.

RSS 1 by the W3C

[StandardsSchmandards]

RSS 1.0 is also the only syndication format endorsed by the World Wide Web consortium. RSS 0.9 and 2.0 were created at the companies Netscape and Userland.

Re:RSS 1 by the W3C

[metamatic]

http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom

Web Feeds vs. RSS

[Kelson]

Funny, just last week everyone was going off about how horrible it was that Microsoft was destroying RSS by renaming it as "Web Feeds," but now suddenly RSS has "won."

So I guess this means...

[SeaFox]

Atom bombed?

RSS extensions

[ad0gg]

You can extend RSS, which means you add nodes to the xml document. The regular nodes are still there allowing backwords compatibility with standard RSS readers. RSS has a very limited capabilities, if you want to do things like podcasting where you need include duration, artists etc, you need to add nodes under a new namspace hence there's an Itunes extension to RSS.

You thinking about the same MS?

[Kamiza Ikioi]

"...it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS."

Are you thinking of the same Microsft that I am? Apple has always been ahead of Microsoft. MS doesn't really care. They won't lose customers to Apple over RSS vs. Atom, and users who don't use IE anyways won't care what MS supports.

It doesn't seem like a big win to me either, but neither does becoming an IETF standard seem like a win (though, imo, I'd like to see all widely used technologies standardized). Whichever gets used most is the one that will win. Slashdot's choice in using RSS seems like a bigger win in comparison, imo. The content sources will drive the victories here, and companies will simply follow them, not really choosing a side.

At least, that's the Microsoft camp's policy. Back the horse you know is already winning the race, take no chances. The last big chance I think MS took was on MS Bob... oh god, the agony, the agony!

Re:Who cares? (-1, Anti-Groupthink)

[osi79]

The point is, that RSS brings the news to you and you don't have to go for them. Convenience is the key. It's notification vs. polling (well, it polls in the background, but for you as a user it feels like notification). If I have a friend who updates his RSS-enabled webpage once in two weeks, I see it in my RSS reader when it happens instead of visiting his page manually once a week or so to just see that nothing has changed. For slashdot and other high-traffic news sites the benefit isn't that big, but it still makes reading news faster and more convenient, if you use a good RSS reader. I can follow 50 personal homepages and occasional updates blogs without much effort. Do this without RSS. The argument "it's just a simple XML file, so where is point" is not a good one, as every good web technology is simple. Did the WWW take over because it was the most sophisticated technical solution? No, it take over because it scales relatively well (compared to things like gopher) and because its simple. I am sure there were many people like you 15 years ago saying "HTML? It's just a simple text file, so where is the point?".

all speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

article wordcount: 141

"appear" instances: 4
"perhaps" instances: 1

high speculation/information ratio detected

Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same reason why the cigarette lighter is used as a power source in cars despite the fact that today's technology would easily allow a standardized clean power outlet in all cars. It works "well enough" that there's no drive to replace it, despite the fact that it's an incredibly inefficient and troublesome source of power. The quick hack always prevails since people are resistant to change.

(Aside: I personally have never seen anyone used a car cigarette lighter to light a cigarette. Why on earth was such a thing introduced in the first place?)

Apple and "RSS"

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS as a name and a brand appears to have one. But what about the format?

See, for instance, Apple's Safari. It puts a large blue "RSS" button when a page alternative content. But when it has both RSS and Atom available, it prefers Atom.

So I guess the RSS brand has won. Definitely. But the format war is far from over, and anyone with anything between their ears knows Atom is far better than RSS.

Wonder what the "RSS" support in Longhorn actually is. It may well be something like Apple. Support both, call it RSS and choose Atom.

Re:FUD, FUD, and more FUD (also pure lies)

[Anonymous Coward]

not only is this article's conclusion about Atom 100% intentially harmful misleading FUD bullshit, but the one shred of fact it initially appeared to be based on isn't even correct!

Vista will support BOTH FORMATS by the time it ships: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,183 6734,00.asp

Hemos and the "feed for all" people should all take dave winer's small, orange, not-well-formed cock out of their mouths and stop spreading lies.

Google bought blogger because..?

[markpapadakis]

Google didn't buy Blogger for their adherence to the Atom specs over RSS. This is just silly. They bought blogger.com for it was the 'first' and biggest player in the blog hosting/management business. That and a few other reasons, some obvious some not.

Care?

[kc0re]

I could care less, my Safari Browser treats RSS and Atom feeds with the same respect.

Just More Slashdot Shillery.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn.

Advertisements to the right, please

[Trevor]

I'm all for ads on Slashdot, but could we keep them in the sub-section known as "Advertisements"?

Not only is this article factually incorrect, but it smacks of paid placement. If the Slashdot folks didn't get paid for this post, perhaps they should evaluate why they just gave away a bit of their brand value to pump one side of a religious war.

Implications of Vista Integration

[Jack9]

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

Does that mean that the final nail in the coffic of Python is Vista's support for .NET?

1000 monkeys typing

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is the best they can come up with? That's what you get for cutting the marketing budget.

Stupid monkeys. Come back when you're literate.

AtomAPI

[Trejkaz]

So... can I post to my weblog using RSS yet? Clearly they must have tackled this problem if they're going up against Atom.

What format?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just click that [XML] thingie in my Opera browser and it works. Why should I care what format is it using?
(...at least till I see 'Your need Microsoft Internet Explorer to read this Microsoft Web Feed')

They're both flawed...

[PhunkySchtuff]

Both RSS and Atom suffer from the fact that they are a solution looking for a problem. The problem that they both intend to solve (allowing easy and standardised updates to content to be published to subscribers) is such that this is one area where "push" technologies would be ideal. No having to configure your newsreader to poll a number of sites every half hour - the remote sites push content out to you if and when they post it.

google outplays microsoft again

[Reed Solomon]

come on, everyone knows the only reason google played atom up was because microsoft was bound to chose the alternative, which is what google wanted all along. google is ten steps ahead of microsoft, bill gates behemoth is a dinosaur, where google is some sort of mechcanical .. robot dinosaur of the future, able to move faster and stealthier and not needing to eat everything in sight in order to survive. Google = Champion of RSS.

Punctuation

[haelduksf]

I think this, summary needs some, more commas. I'm no grammar nazi, but this is, absurd.

Vista will support Atom.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/08/02/446280 .aspx

error filled & biased

[atastypie]

I posted a response to this "article" earlier today which I am just going to paste here:

Normally I try to avoid these articles, but Sharon Housley's RSS Won the Syndication Standards Battle is one I can't avoid. She claims that RSS has overtaken Atom because of support (or lack there of) for RSS by Microsoft and Google.

Sharon began by saying Microsoft had dumped Atom in favour for RSS. Is it just me or did Microsoft not say that they will support Atom almost 3 weeks ago? She says that Google News feeds having both RSS and Atom is a sign of weakness in the format, even though Google-owned Blogger (and Atom supporter) has always provided a link to FeedBurner for those who prefer RSS instead of Atom. Having both RSS and Atom on Google News isn't a sign that RSS is dominating so much as it is Google providing a choice of format to users. By the way, podcasting is not limited to RSS 2.0 as Atom supports Podcasting in a way that is arguably more powerful than RSS's. Microsoft's lists, another RSS innovation, are also easily done with Atom. Don't forget that the IETF approved the propsed Atom standard while RSS has been fragmented many times by different authors.

With Microsoft calling its support for syndication web feeds, Google refering to them as feeds on Google News and web clips on Google Desktop 2 (as Brad Hill mentions in Google Shuns the RSS Name) it seems likely that other sites will offer syndication through a generic name in more than one format. How all of this can be viewed as RSS winning any kind of standards battle is baffling.

Dana

Differences?

[TeXMaster]

Is there a site explaining the differences between RSS and Atom feeds?

The official RSS vs Atom report

[kiddailey]

I have it on good authority that this official report was a significant piece of evidence in determining which syndication method had indeed been adopted as the industry standard.

Not just Apple and MS but Yahoo too..

[FinalCut]

Lets not forget that Yahoo also embraced and extended RSS with Media RSS

http://search.yahoo.com/mrss

I guess that's the beauty of an XML you can always just define your own extension - in the RSS case so long as you don't break basic standard compatiability then your extension will work (most likely often ignored, but will still work).

Greenrd's Law

[wiredog]

From K5

"Evey post disparaging someone else's spelling or grammar, or lauding one's own spelling or grammar, will inevitably contain a spelling or grammatical error."

Did Dave Winer issue this press release?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm..

That depends on how you implement it...

[Millennium]

It's quite possible to implement only the syndication part of Atom, offering the feed but not the API. If you do this, then Atom is no more of a security threat than RSS is. The only threat would be if the site were to inadvertently publish sensitive information, and this is an issue no matter what format you publish it in, be it Atom, RSS, HTML, or something else.

Even if you do implement the publication API, Atom includes features to address security concerns. As such, it is no more of a security risk than any of the other Weblog APIs out there.

That's the beauty of atom: although syndication and publication are closely related, you can implement them separately. Many services implement the syndication but not the publication already. Implementing the publication without the syndication would be pretty strange, but you could do it if you really wanted to.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Atom's steadfast supporter Google, appears to have seen the light. In the past Google had strategically steered clear of endorsing the RSS specification hoping that Atom, would take hold. Google's recent new service that allows web surfers to monitor Google News using either RSS or Atom feeds, appears to be an acknowledgment that perhaps in purchasing Blogger, they chose the wrong specification.

Slashdot posts, hit an all-time low this week when the last pre-revolutionary poster, died in his sleep. As everyone, knows since the great Denebian slugworm uprising of 2057, every poster, has been putting commas between subject and verb. Since the slugworms, conquered the Earth all electronic communications, have been required to conform to this convention. Older posters, were grandfathered in, of course. A memorial service for the poster, will be held next Thursday.

M$ will support both RSS and Atom

[darluggian]

The new M$ offering will support RSS and Atom.
This thread is a lot of hype about nothing.
RSS 0.9x has most of the market.
RSS 1.0 is irrelevant
RSS 2.0 has little share.
RSS 3.0 is a practical joke
Atom has little share.

But Atom is better.
Why wouldn't people move to Atom?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/rs s/
"Windows Vista will support all common RSS formats, including: RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3. We will support Atom 1.0 when it's released."

So Google and M$ support both syndication methods - hardly a "win" for RSS. What's all the hype about?