KhmerAK* | Active Koder

This is a nice catchy new for developer, though many of you maybe just a user. Do you know that feeds that you are reading are made up of two different publishing standards Atom and RSS, and now it is fighting for its own popularization? So far RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has gain the majority of feeds and has already been reached its version 2 (RSS2.0) which has been used by many sites and systems ( Feed makers) Especially within the blogging world ( Blogsphere) RSS 2.0 seems to be very common. It is used by WordPress blogging system which is the most popular open source software for blogging. The blog you are reading is also using WordPress. So if you are using WordPress, the default feed is automatically generated in to RSS.20 publishing standard.

Atom is another feed standard which is commonly used by Google systems, Blogspot. Those fans who are blogging under blogspot.com, their feeds are automatically generated in Atom publishing standard.

So what is the problem? As a user you do not need to worry since the result that you get from this two technologies are the same, you can add whichever to your feed reader. But as a developer probably you have to make a choice or go both while you want to make feed for you site or system. Actually, RSS2.0 is widely used, but Atom is threating…

According to Tim Bray said:

“Atom is done. Now the editorial processes grind away and eventually the official specification of the Atom Publishing Protocol will be an RFC substantially identical to draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-17; it’ll join RFC4287 as the official products of the IETF Atompub Working Group.”
via Danny Ayers

What does that mean in english? Basically that the Atom Publishing Protocol is almost finished. It’s not yet ‘official’, but it’s all over bar the shouting. There is already an Atom syndication format, which is a competitor to the more widely used RSS 2.0. The term ‘Atom’ is used to refer to both the syndication and the publishing standards - and ultimately Atom aims to enhance feeds on the Web.

Atom is actually a bit more complicated but it is a much more powerful feed standard and has a notably support from Google.

Atom Publishing Protocol is what is coming, can RSS2.0 stand still or probably RSS3.0 is coming too? Do you think you consider to switch when they come?

Syndication war.

technorati tags:Atom, RSS, Syndication

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Technolgy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.