Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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.
from:
.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/rssteam/
"
Beta 1 of Windows Vista and IE 7 for XP currently supports the web feed formats RSS
"
Not only that, but the comma has no place there...
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.
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.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
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.").
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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?
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
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.
Simpy
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.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
All of them. They also are going to support Atom.
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).
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.
Signature.
...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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Even more obvious is that RSS' should be RSS's instead.
From Wikipedia:
The RSS 2.* branch (initially UserLand, now Harvard) includes the following versions:
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.