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Atom 1.0 vs RSS 2.0

Posted by Hemos on Mon Jul 18, 2005 08:26 AM
from the the-unseen-battle? dept.
The Internet Programming IT Technology
heeeraldo writes "Is there another format war on the horizon? This wiki compares the two, and finds that even though RSS has far greater deployment (and mindshare), Atom 1.0 solves a lot of the problems associated with it."
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Atom 1.0 vs RSS 2.0 50 Comments More /

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  • Can't tell the difference (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2005, @08:33AM (#13092875)
    Most users cant tell the difference, even if they cared to.
    So, as a conclusion: Noone cares.

  • No question (Score:3, Insightful)

    by washley (865407) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:33AM (#13092877)
    Since Microsoft is throwing their weight behind RSS, it's pretty obvious it will be the winner.

  • Neither... (Score:5, Funny)

    by yogix (865930) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:34AM (#13092884)
    ... IE7 will support 'extended' RSS. So there!

    http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/06/24/432390 .aspx [msdn.com]

    Regards, Yogix

  • I would consider... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zegebbers (751020)
    This isn't trolling, just confusion. I would consider myself to be relatively informed about tech matters, however there is very little info about atom and it is hard to google for. Would it be possible to have a tiny summary as to what atom is ?

    • Re:I would consider... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Here you go(it's tiny, you might have to squint):

    • Re:I would consider... (Score:5, Informative)

      by superskippy (772852) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:53AM (#13093038)

      RSS and Atom are standardised ways of having a live list of stories appear from say a newssite (like this one) in various programs. Firefox calls these live bookmarks. I came here using firefox by clicking on my toolbar, seeing all of the new stories, and deciding I was interested in this one. You can also use it for desktop "news ticker" applets.

      The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people. As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2, but some people argue 2 is worse than 1 :(. All of these standard's owners have been accused of not taking on board comments from the wider community.

      Atom is another protocol for doing the same thing. Technical issues aside, it gets my vote because they didn't decide to call it RSS 3. Or RSS 10.

      • The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people.

        Three? Try nine [diveintomark.org].

        As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2

        No. The short version is that somebody at Netscape invented 0.9something based on RDF. The public release (another 0.9something) was rushed for my.netscape.com and wasn't based on RDF. Then Netsca

        • Re:I would consider... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by laffer1 (701823)
          This is very interesting because I never realized the parallels between RSS and HTML standards. Consider all the changes between the various HTML standards. Considering this is slashdot, I won't go into extreme detail. A little reading on w3.org, etc. will clarify for those that do no know.

          The w3 refactored HTML 4.01 into XHTML 1.0 using XML instead of SGML. This is similar to the RDF to standard XML change in RSS. Then, the w3 modularized XHTML 1.0 Strict into XHTML 1.1, similar to the back and forth

    • Re:I would consider... (Score:3, Informative)

      by WWWWolf (2428)

      Well, these are are XML syndication formats. In other words, they move headlines and article summaries from server to user in machine-parseable format.

      There's RSS, which is the reigning de facto standard, but it also is regrettably very, very liberally specified, and even less frequently heeded. Everyone's extending it to their own heart's content more or less competently. There are lots of different variations. Not easy to implement, not easy to learn.

      Atom is an attempt to make a real standard-like sta

  • Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by creimer (824291) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:35AM (#13092890) Homepage
    Maybe Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 can be combined to create "RFusion 0"? Just an idea...

  • whoa nelly (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rinisari (521266) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:36AM (#13092909) Homepage Journal
    Either that article is heavily biased or ATOM 1.0 completely demolishes everything that RSS is/was/used to be. I wish that the article would have at least showed one or two points where RSS is better, but it appears that there isn't any such points.

    • Re:whoa nelly (Score:5, Insightful)

      by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:40AM (#13092929)
      Oddly enough, the Atom Wiki favors Atom.
    • Well, of course! Click on the Front Page [intertwingly.net] link, and Voila! You are on the Atom development wiki. This is hardly an unbiased discussion.

    • Re:whoa nelly (Score:2, Interesting)

      by axxackall (579006)
      The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work.

      This is the point: Atom is just a fork. RSS is a real concept. Forks come and go, a concept stands.

    • Either that article is heavily biased or ...

      There are at least some out there that would say the article is heavily [docuverse.com] biased [sourcelabs.com]. Not that these responses aren't.

      Me? I like RSS 2.0. It's simple (for what is does), and extensible (for most of what it doesn't). To each their own.

  • Once again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bad to the Ben (871357) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:37AM (#13092916)
    Back to the VHS Vs. Betamax days eh? If there's one thing that war proved, it's that technical sophistication is irrelevant: mindshare is what matters. If nobody's using it, it doesn't matter if it has the prettiest widgets.

    That said, one nice thing about this format war is that there doesn't have to be a loser. It's fairly easy to handle multiple formats in software (note the number of redundant music formats), unlike hardware which is usually impossible. If the process of reading RSS tags or Atom tags is made transparent to the user, who cares who wins?

    • Re:Once again (Score:3, Insightful)

      by $RANDOMLUSER (804576)
      The difference, in this case, is that the decision to use RSS or Atom will be made by the website operators, not the end consumers. The consumers will use what the webmasters use. And I'm thinking that the webmasters will be attracted to the features rather than the ubiquity of a particular format.
      • You don't think the people who code the web browsers might have an opinion too?

        Whether or not IE supports a standard has a big bearing on uptake. Look how much more widespread jpeg is to png.

        • Re:Once again (Score:4, Informative)

          by jez9999 (618189) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:45AM (#13093496) Homepage Journal
          IE supports enough PNG functionality to be able to do anything you could do with JPEG, and more. It just can't do proper transparency, which JPEGs don't support either.

          • Re:Once again (Score:3, Informative)

            by damiangerous (218679)
            the fact that Unisys was collecting LZW (used by PNG) licenses from 1995 to 1999 also have something to do about that.

            No, LZW was a major motivator for creating PNG [wikipedia.org], not a mark against it. PNG is LZW free. Also it isn't limited to 256 colors like GIF.

            AFAIK, PNG was never aimed at replacing JPEG... its main aim was to provide a better, Compuserve-free GIF alternative.

            You're right about that though, if not for the right reasons. PNG wasn't really designed to have anything to do with JPEG, they mostl

    • ...technical sophistication is irrelevant: mindshare is what matters. If nobody's using it, it doesn't matter if it has the prettiest widgets.

      Please tell me you didn't really mean to imply that technical sophistication is achieved by making pretty widgets.

      • No, I didn't mean to imply that completely.

        Please tell me you didn't really mean to imply that all technical sophistication has nothing to do with user functionality and ergonomics ;) .

  • format war? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Doesn't it depend on what IE7 will support?

    I mean there are still 60% who still use that incompatible Browser because they believe that it is the internet and the Modem is a special powercord.

  • It's not pretty folks (Score:3, Funny)

    by revery (456516) <.ten.2cac. .ta. .selrahc.> on Monday July 18 2005, @08:40AM (#13092931) Homepage
    Defend yourself RSS...

    Smack!
    Kapow!

    At least put your hands in front of your face.

    Whack!
    Bam!

    Get up off the mat, RSS!!!
    Get up!!

    I can't watch anymore...

  • Atom's More Than A Syndication Format (Score:5, Informative)

    by arthurs_sidekick (41708) on Monday July 18 2005, @08:40AM (#13092934) Homepage
    Atom is both a syndication format and an API [bitworking.org] for creation, updating, and deletion of content. It's already in widespread use by Blogger.

    What's been (all but) finalized is the syndication format (and rules for extending it). This allows the working group to firm up the details of the publishing API, which, for my money, is the real payoff with Atom.

    A pretty good overview of the history of RSS and the motivations behind Atom is here [computer.org].

  • Which one is growing? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DanielMarkham (765899) * on Monday July 18 2005, @08:41AM (#13092938) Homepage
    While the article was a nice feature comparison of the two, it really didn't get into the "format war" question at the top of the page here.
    Besides industry support, my only question would be "which one is growing?" Which of these formats is expected to get a new version number sometime soon?
    If you ask me, that is why Microsoft is talking about adding "extensions" to RSS -- by growing and adapting the standard, it gets more bells and whistles, more application support, and more momentum in the development community.

    Oracle: More Complicated Pricing Model Needed? [whattofix.com]

  • Sadly.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by JeFurry (75785)
    ....some moron has defaced the page already (and is apparently deleting archived hostorical versions of it). Life expectancy of unlocked Wiki page when slashdotted: 15-20 seconds.

  • Cache (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2005, @08:51AM (#13093025)
    http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2F www.intertwingly.net%2Fwiki%2Fpie%2FRss20AndAtom10 Compared [64.233.161.104]Google Cache, now that it's been defaced.

  • RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. RSS 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Feneric (765069) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:01AM (#13093101) Homepage

    AFAIK the format war between RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 hasn't even ended yet. In spite of the version numbering, RSS 2.0 is more of a .95 than a 2.0 since it's an incremental improvement over .94. It doesn't really add any capabilities to RSS 1.0 (both can support enclosures). The only real difference is that RSS 1.0 is based on RDF while 2.0 isn't; this supposedly makes 2.0 simpler, but potentially less capable.

    It's a pity that all the RSS folks couldn't simply hash together a common standard rather than wasting time on competing standards. Is 2.0 really that much simpler than 1.0? Is 1.0 really that much more capable than 2.0? Does Atom really add much to the mix? It seems that it ought to be possible to find a middle ground.

  • One thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Apreche (239272) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:09AM (#13093151) Homepage Journal
    One thing that really bothers me about RSS, no matter how much I like it, is how every site uses it differently. I was writing a simple aggregation program and using php/magpierss. Every single site puts the date and time of the items in a different tag. Some use datetime, some use pubdate, some use dc->date and some don't put the date! Seriously, no matter the standard it wont help if not everyone uses it fully and properly.

  • GUID (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SteveX (5640) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:10AM (#13093157) Homepage
    For the most part it doesn't matter which you use because client software is going to have to work with both now that they've both been deployed (and for a while Google was only publishing Atom, I'm not sure if they still do that but it forced aggregator developers to get on board).

    But because an Atom feed must include a guid element, the client has a way of uniquely identifying an item. This means that when you subscribe to an atom feed, you're not going to see duplicate articles the way you do with RSS when the RSS feed doesn't include a guid or any unique identifier (which is legal) and the client has to make one up by hashing the content.

    I wrote a bit about this here [stevex.org].

  • Most of the problems with RSS 2.0 that the article points out, are fixed in RSS 1.0.

    For those who don't know, RSS 0.9x was basically Dave Winer's personal plaything. When the standards community put together an RSS 1.0 standard, he took his most recent 0.9x 'standard' and renamed it RSS 2.0 to make it look more up-to-date.

    Why not take RSS 1.0 and fix the few problems it has?

  • As someone who's implemented them both (Score:4, Informative)

    by savala (874118) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:58AM (#13093624)

    Atom wins hands-down. Things are actually well specified [atompub.org] .
    I can just walk through the atom specification, implementing it as I go, and not have any questions about what is required, what type of content can be present in any one element, I don't have to look up five even less well-specified different modules just to get the basics of the feed together (and thus also don't have to worry about namespaces), what elements and attributes mean (actually, I spent a minor five minutes agonizing over what I should put in the term atribute of the category element, given that the label attribute contains the human readable version, before realizing that I was completely free in this, as the "scheme" os up to myself, and deciding to mirror how categories are named in the url on the website (which I found to be consistent with various other already existing atom 1.0 feeds [intertwingly.net] that I checked)), or... well, basically any kind of question that you need to think about as you implement a new and previously unknown specification.

    RSS on the other hand (any of the 9 incompatible versions)... *shudders* Those specifications don't tell me anything. I copy/paste from other feeds and heavily use the feedvalidator [feedvalidator.org], but... *shakes his head*
    Once all feedreaders have been updated to support Atom 1.0 completely, I'll go and pull the plug on the remaining RSS feeds, and good riddance too!

    • Slashdot uses RSS 1.0, not 2.0. Just a side note.

    • Re:We use it! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:19AM (#13093217) Homepage Journal
      Slashdot has the most broken RSS feed ever invented. You get banned for 72 hours if you access it more than once every 30 minutes. Not really a problem, except that Slashcode is braindead at identifying individuals. Two computers behind a NAT are treated as the same person, for example. Worse, my ISP uses a transparent proxy for everyone in my city (most people here with broadband use my ISP, since their cable service is a lot cheaper than competing ADSL suppliers). Does Slashdot recognise this? No, they block the transparent proxy whenever more than one person using it accesses the site within a 30 minute period. Clever, huh? The result is that the Slashdot feed is always blocked for me at home.

    • Re:As If I Cared (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:26AM (#13093286) Homepage Journal
      Are you behind a NAT or a transparent proxy (provided by your ISP)? If so, then you are likely, like me, never to be unbanned from the Slashdot RSS feed because it can't tell the difference between you and other people with the same IP.

    • Re:Where's the comparison? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Isofarro (193427) on Monday July 18 2005, @09:27AM (#13093292) Homepage
      Atom cleanly specifies how to incorporate plain text, html and XHTML content in an entry. Covering how text and html needs to be escaped, etc.

      RSS2.0 had a problem last year where Reuters suffered a public embarrassment adopting the format. They followed the specification correctly, and it resulted in silent data loss - their stock identifiers were in angled brackets and got treated as an HTML tag by news aggregators.

      It wasn't rocket science, but this simple thing turned out to be impossible to do with RSS2.0 - it was tried many times. After the funky feed debacle, the community realised that a separate format independent of RSS2.0 was the only way to fix the underlying problem.

      The proponents of RSS2.0 tried to fix the silent data loss, and ended up breaking backwards compatibility with RSS0.92 - something they weren't prepared to do before Atom.
    • Because browsing around hundreds of web sites for news is a pain in the ass. Let the information flow to YOU. It's all about structuring the info so you can do more with it beyond simple screen scraping.

      I'm not talking about just Dilbert comics or other entertainment outlets. Imagine notification of software updates. Email is lousy for this sort of thing when you get hundreds of emails per day. It's not searchable and it sits in your own account. Another benefit of RSS is control over the lists. You ever get an email from someone you know that didn't really come from someone you know, yet had a nice virus payload attached? This doesn't do that. Any info that comes from the RSS channel is something YOU have subscribed to and unsubscribing is dead easy.

      Further, with an RSS Reader I use called Feed On Feeds [minutillo.com], you can access its mySQL backend from any other software to do what you want with the information streams. There are many other readers that use this same philosophy. If you MUST have mailing lists, well, then mail out from there; not all of these sites have mailing lists and this would make a great way to present it in that format. You can reblog select posts, or a channel combining a number of other channels.

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