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. "

MSRSS

[Langley]

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?

FUD, FUD, and more FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

About the Author: Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com/ [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.

RSS vs. ATOM

[digitalgimpus]

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?

BFD

[scovetta]

Atom is an export format, right? So is rss. They're a little different. So someone at the Googleplex needs to write blog2rss.py and they can get rid of blog2atom.py.

Or does Atom have something to do with the way the data is stored internally? And I think Google did pretty well with Blogger-- it's like saying, "Google chose wrong when they bought Blogger, because Blogger used a different stylesheet on their home page than Google does."

Re:Article from a biased company

[TheRaven64]

And didn't Atom recently become an official IETF standard? It seems a lot more of a win than being embedded in beta versions of Vista - it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS.

Big win for RSS

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I know Sun thought that Microsoft's adoption of Java was A Big Win, too.

Ask Slashdot: Easy RSS?

[kisrael]

I have a homebrew-ed backend weblog, http://kisrael.com/ [kisrael.com]

I know RSS has forked, and I don't use it much myself but I know others have asked for an RSS feed...is there a simple guide to outputting my content in an RSS kind of way?

Also, if I wanted to mirror my content on an LJ, would it be easier to automate the LJ postings and get an RSS feed off of that, or vice versa, or are they completely indpendent tasks?

Re:What's with the bias?

[LnxAddct]

The submitter is the owner of a company specializing in RSS editing/creation software.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[Jugalator]

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.

Err...

This just seem to be a rebranding like Firefox and "Live Bookmarks".

Numerous hints at it in the article too:

Because of this, its renaming of RSS is not a sign the company is trying to remake the technology for its own purposes but rather a way to make a distinction between RSS and a feature of IE.

Microsoft is adding RSS functionality to the next version of Windows, Windows Vista, primarily through the IE 7 version of its Web browser.

Of course, there's an RSS zealot saying this too:

"Like it or not Microsoft, the technology is called RSS. If you try to change that, for whatever reason, you will get routed around," wrote Winer, a software guru who is credited with pioneering RSS and other Web standards.

Did he complain as loudly when competing web browsers introduced RSS support under other names? Or is it a Microsoft thing... again? I must ask myself if he visits HTML pages or websites as well.

Re:Don't you mean embraced&extended RSS

[Midnight Thunder]

Microsoft is not the only one to embrace and extend. Apple seems to have done the same thing with the Podcast file spec (which is RSS based):

How To Publish a Podcast on the iTunes Music Store [apple.com]

Re:Atom's Death Toll

[wdr1]

This is an ad, intended to drive site traffic. Not to say Hemos understood it to be as such, but it definitely is. (If you look at the "About us" on the feed page, you'll see that they also own "NotePage", the the site listed as the submitter's homepage.)

It's not so bad that this story was approved as an ad, but rather it's so poorly written and poorly understood by the author. After announcing support for RSS, MS's Longhorn team bent over backwards [msdn.com] to explain that they were supporting Atom too. The rest of it really is a long winded way to say that part of Google started using RSS in addition to Atom (not instead of!). In fact, I've no idea what point he's even making with Blogger, as they continue to use Atom!

Give the utter crap of this post, the only thing that surprised me was that it was posted by timothy!

-Bill

Greenrd's Law

[wiredog]

From K5 [kuro5hin.org]

"Evey post disparaging someone else's spelling or grammar, or lauding one's own spelling or grammar, will inevitably contain a spelling or grammatical error."