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. "
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?
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.
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?
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."
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I know Sun thought that Microsoft's adoption of Java was A Big Win, too.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The submitter is the owner of a company specializing in RSS editing/creation software.
Regards,
Steve
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
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."
Best Slashdot Co