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. "
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".)
"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."
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
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?
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.
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?
does anyone have real info on which version numbers of RSS (and according to whose spec) works with the Microsoft implementation?
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.
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
"
That's hands down the most biased "news" posting I've seen on Slashdot... this month.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
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
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.
are, frequently posted, on slashdot. They, often amuse, me.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
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?
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)
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 man, RSS man,
RSS man hates Atom man,
They have a fight, RSS wins.
RSS man.
no comment
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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
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
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.
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.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
...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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
You've never heard of ISO 8601?
XML is UTF-8 by default unless another encoding is explicitly given in the first line.
HTTP is compressed by default. XML, being so redundant with all of its angle brackets, quotes, and equals signs, compresses very well indeed.
So... can I post to my weblog using RSS yet? Clearly they must have tackled this problem if they're going up against Atom.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!