On Nov 8, 2004, at 2:44 PM, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
So far Atom is a less featureful version of RSS 2.0.
Atom as currently specified has the following advantages over RSS:
1. There's zero ambiguity about single and double escaping, you can use whichever suits your publication process better and not worry about silent data loss.
2. You can include binary chunks right there in-feed, base64 encoded.
3. You get help for aggregate feeds using atom:origin
4. You have a date, atom:updated, with cleanly-specified semantics ("publisher says something changed") that's *guaranteed to be there* per-entry
5. It's in an XML namespace
6. It's got a good accessibility story: you have to have an atom:summary if there's no src= or it's binary.
7. You have clean semantics for linking to the entry this describes or the entry it's talking about.
Personally, I think these are highly significant. But even if you disagreed, there are two other reasons why it would be good to get the Atom format spec finished:
1. Atom has an official specification change-controlled by a highly-independent standards org, there is no suspicion that any vendor or individual is pulling the strings. This might not strike you as important, but I assure you that there are lots of people to whom it is.
2. The atom format is one foundation of the Atom publishing protocol, and I guarantee that the world can *really* find a use for the protocol.
Also as regards RSS2 and Atom, my take was that the things in RSS2 that aren't in Atom are widely-unimplemented and thus better omitted (that's how we got from SGML to XML). I thought <category> was widely-used, but I was wrong. Is there anything in RSS2 that we don't have but is in wide use? -Tim
