Is it time to the world to move on from RSS and to its successor, Atom? Some considerations:
Atom has an IETF standard for syndication. Atom has an IETF standard for publication. Atom was designed for modularity. Atom supports rich, well-defined activities within feeds.
RSS is effectively frozen at 2.0:
RSS is by no means a perfect format, but it is very popular and widely supported. Having a settled spec is something RSS has needed for a long time. The purpose of this work is to help it become a unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats. Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1. We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format. Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names.
It is full of legacy tags and archaic design decisions:
The purpose of the <textInput> element is something of a mystery. You can use it to specify a search engine box. Or to allow a reader to provide feedback. Most aggregators ignore it.
We are spending all this time duplicating effort. Every feed reader needs to deal with Atom and RSS. Every blog provides an Atom feed and an RSS feed. Users trying to subscribe to blog feeds are presented with an unnecessary choice.
RSS solved a need at the time, even though it was crufty and difficult to use and difficult to parse (remember when RSS XML didn’t have to be well-formed XML?). It served as an inspiration for millions of sites to open up their content to new methods of reading. It inspired a great successor, Atom, which has surpassed it many times over.
We dropped gopher when its time ran out. It’s time to make Atom the primary format for blogs.
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Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).
Yeah, I knew someone would call me out on that. That’s part of the template. The feed from here goes out through FeedBurner, gets munged by the “SmartFeed” feature, after which the format is completely out of my control.
Migrating to Atom isn’t something we can do overnight – it requires changes up and down the stack.
[I changed the last line of the post a bit]
If you are writing software that produces syndicated feeds, Atom is the logical choice. It’s an Internet standard that’s extremely well-specified, and there will never be any power struggles over its ownership.
If you are writing software that consumes feeds, you are stuck supporting both of them for the foreseeable future. The RSS Advisory Board could never get public support to revise the RSS spec and deal with some of the interop issues that stem from such an imprecise spec.
The closest we got was to write an RSS Best-Practices Profile that describes all of the issues for implementers and how to best deal with them:
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile
RSS Feeds are really very helpful and you could get site and news updates from it.~’;