RSS vs. Atom - har du eit tips?

[hemo]

Eg ser at einskilde sider støttar fleire typar news feeds.

Er det nokon skilnad?

 

Kvifor bør ein vele det eine og ikkje det andre, om ein har støtte for alt (i Feed Readeren sin)?

[Gronz]

Forskjell mellom Atom og RSS:

 

What versions of syndicated content are supported by My MSN?

 

While My MSN is designed to display feeds that comply with all versions of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Atom, it is optimized to read RSS version 2.0. RSS and Atom are both XML technologies that support the syndication process. For most users, the differences are not important, but in general, Atom is a format capable of feeding more complex information.

 

To learn more about RSS or Atom, go to www.XML.com or go to www.AtomEnabled.org, or to learn more about RSS Version 2.0, see the specifications for RSS 2.0.

 

I did some quick research on the differences between Atom and RSS and found that most people who have been in the on-the-bleeding-edge seem to feel RSS to be a broken technology that has outlived its usefulness.

 

Quote:

 

What are the advantages of Atom over RSS 2.0? What problems does it solve?

 

The original motivation is pretty well described on the Wiki :

http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Motivation

Essentially various minor technical bits and pieces, but critically moving on past the political obstacles associated with RSS.

 

What's interesting is that over the 7 weeks or so the project's been running, the emphasis has shifted a fair bit from the basic format (i.e. "RSS Next Generation") to the API. Having a good, standard way of communicating with blog/syndication tools has been a requirement from the start, so you could e.g. use the same tool to post a new blog entry to a Movable Type blog as a Blogger blog.

 

RSS systems usually use the Blogger API, which was originally just a quick hack, and the MetaWeblog API which isn't much better. Both of these use XML-RPC that goes direct from code to a programmatic kind of XML language, which is converted back into procedure calls at the other end. It's a bit of an outdated approach, web service techniques have moved on.

 

 

There is a pretty decent posting on Cover Pages - Technology Reports that is larger than this but this excerpt details some of the underlying issues:

 

Quote:

The battle between RSS and Atom has divided the blogging world since the summer, when critics of RSS came together to create an alternative format. Since then, a raft of blog sites and individuals have lined up behind Atom, while Yahoo has thrown its considerable weight behind RSS. The Blogger decision to offer only Atom has angered supporters of RSS, who accuse Google of helping to splinter a wide network of RSS-using bloggers... 'They're breaking users, including people who aren't using their software,' wrote Dave Winer, a Harvard fellow who is commonly considered the arbiter of the RSS format, on his long-running Scripting.com blog. 'There is a lot of implicit trust in the RSS network, an assumption that vendors will behave rationally and will care for users. Any participant can break us, as Google is proving... RSS supporters argued that Google could have given members a choice between RSS or Atom, since Blogger already offers the older format. But Atom partisans lauded Google's move, saying it made sense in the context of the company's support for open-source software and open standards. 'RSS has long been controlled by a single vendor or entity,' said Mark Pilgrim, an early contributor to Atom. 'Atom's an open standard, so people can point at the spec and say they're conforming to it, and it's not controlled by one of their competitors. And RSS is.'... Atom backers are proceeding with plans to bring their technology under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

 

The thing is, if you have the syndication language well defined, then you can used this not only to publish the feeds, but also *create* the blog entries in the first place. Normally you'd use a http GET to retrieve the feed XML from a particular URI. To create a new entry of whatever, all you have to do is pass a chunk of the XML over http using a POST. The beauty of this is that the syndication system gets unified, (hopefully) making life a lot easier for developers.

 

 

Apparently, this particular argument of Atom vs RSS has been going on for awhile. Last July, a thread was developing on the Ten Reasons Why site that was beating this issue up -- one notable posting is from Chris Pirillo:

 

Quote:

I, too, am tired of reading messages that start with: "Hey, I tried this RSS thing, and all I see is a bunch of code in my browser. What am I doing wrong?" Nothing.

 

Posted by: Chris Pirillo at July 31, 2003 01:51 PM

[hemo]

Ehh... men planen var ikkje å laga eller tilby...

Likevel: Konklusjonen blir at det spelar inga rolle om du vel rss eller atom, for begge to er "lika gode"?

 

Støttar feed reader'en din begge to (samt variantane av RSS), så kan du velga blandt dei (heilt i blinde)...