Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors, in this case namely support from makers of popular software and content as well as social influence and documentation skills of creators.<p>The person who pushed RSS to success (IMO) Dave Winer was superb at communicating and evangelizing his goals, connecting partners like Netscape and NYT, and documenting his work including the RSS related tools he built.<p>His spec was “worse” in the sense that it was under specified but better in the sense that it achieved wide support (both in text and podcast form) among people who made content. This is partly because Dave had first an influential email newsletter and Wired column (DaveNet) and second an influential very early blog Scripting News. He had also been working with news companies for years at prior startups. He could write well. He showed up for and arranged meetings with people who did not at first understand the need for something like rss. He was clear and relentless in his promotion which was borne out of what seemed to be a genuine desire for open standards in this area rather than greed / trying to do lock in.<p>People with technical backgrounds in places like this tend to fixate on the technical aspects of Atom vs RSS. There is no question Atom is more technically correct. There is also no question (IMO) it came too late and focused on the wrong things — being correct and complete at the expense of being complicated and hard to understand — and more importantly was led and promoted by people who lacked the social skills to make it popular outside of technical circles. (These folks could be brutal about rss's flaws without seeming to have awareness of this shortcoming in their own effort.)
I prefer Atom to RSS.<p>1) Atom has separate <updated> and <published> fields, while RSS just has <pubDate>. Moreover, RSS wants to you add a redundant day of the week in the date, i.e., "Sat, 07 Sep 2002 0:00:01 GMT", which is dumb.<p>2) Atom allows you to use <content type="html"><![CDATA[]]></content> where you can just stick in HTML, whereas RSS <description> just specifies "entity-encoded HTML is allowed".<p>3) RSS has redundant <guid isPermaLink="true"> vs. <link>. Which one is a feed reader supposed to use?
There is the Atom Feed Format and there is the Atom Syndication Protocol:<p><pre><code> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5023
</code></pre>
These specs and the discussion about them at the time really are from a different era of the web. The Syndication Protocol fully embraced REST which was also white hot then. There was a real feeling that with a good format and a standardized way to consume and interact with the resources, it would allow for easier sharing of not just blog posts but other data as well.<p>As intense as the discussion was around the development of RFC-5023, it was basically ignored from the moment it was released and even the main spec author declared it basically dead not very long afterward:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090421042741/http://bitworking.org/news/425/atompub-is-a-failure" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20090421042741/http://bitworking...</a><p>Needless to say, the web took an entirely different direction and while these specs exist, there isn't much interest in them any longer.
Whenever I need to provide a feed, I always choose Atom because (a) the spec is better and (b) anything that can handle RSS will generally also handle Atom.
Does ActivityPub these days replace the traditional RSS/Atom feeds? Feels like it would be the natural successor. Is there anything missing besides people publishing and consuming?
For my blog tool I made feeds in 3 flavours; RSS, Atom and my own:<p><a href="http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss</a><p><a href="http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom</a><p><a href="http://sprout.rupy.se/feed" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://sprout.rupy.se/feed</a><p>Now that I look at them they are equally bad.<p>That said ActivityPub with JSON does not strike me as better.<p>Seriously considering getting into the fray...
My strong impression at the time was that the primary impetus for establishing Atom was that Dave Winer was abrasive and opinionated, and some people just didn't like him very much.
In case anyone is looking for a free rss reader for mobile here's the one I built for myself after Feedly became unbearably slow <a href="https://www.justfeed.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.justfeed.io/</a>
Well, the FTC is about to crack down on fake 5-star reviews levying 50k fines, perhaps paid fake endorsements are next?<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/30/fake-reviews-online-ftc/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/30/fake-re...</a>