Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
18 points by bitshift
18 points by bitshift
Could Atom be rebranded as "RSS 3"? It's RSS that has all the brand recognition.
Doubtful. While it’s unclear exactly where the trademark lives, Dave Winer and his acolytes would put up a huge fuss.
Edit case in point, this recent submission https://lobste.rs/s/ypl6tr/directory_people_who_love_rss (maybe it inspired OP), explicitely equates RSS == RSS 2.0.
I've implemented syndication feeds for about twenty years and Atom was always the obvious pick. Twenty years on, I still can't name a reason to choose RSS over it.
Outside podcasting, where Apple made RSS the practical choice, what's actually going through people's heads when they pick RSS anyway?
When I first added an RSS feed to my blog, Atom wasn't a thing. Since then, I've added Atom, but kept the RSS feed because I could.
Edited to add: I just checked my logs for last month. Atom requests are twice the level of RSS requests. These are just the raw numbers. But the number of unique agents are equal.
The main benefit I remember from Atom 20ish years ago when I looked at both in detail was that Atom was XML. If you embedded HTML, it had to be XHTML. This meant that your Atom reader could extract the bits to forward to a web browser (or web view) without needing to understand HTML. It also meant the summaries could be (or contain) SVG and other things.
This also meant that XMPP could be used as a transport for Atom without any encapsulation. I hoped that XMPP would take over from polled HTTP as the mechanism for following feeds. Today, ActivityPub has largely taken over as the mechanism for broadcasting updates and is probably a better place to focus effort.
With no hostility towards the author I must say that I wouldn't start off an article with a No True Scotsman fallacy.
Other than that, I honestly find both Atom and RSS user unfriendly. I offer both, edit them manually, and occasionally run them through a feed validator. The less time I have to spend on them the better.
Where’s the No True Scotsman? Are you interpreting “Everyone with knowledge agrees that Atom is technically superior to RSS.” as that? It’s definitely not intended to be taken that way. I mean that Atom’s technical superiority is undeniable: if someone knows much about both Atom and RSS and says that Atom is not technically superior, they’re lying.
I didn't think there was bad faith intent, hence the "no hostility", but that is a No True Scotsman indeed.
I don’t see how. “No true Scotsman” is about modifying a falsified claim retroactively. In my sentence, I believe “knowledge” clearly implies “about both Atom and RSS”, but disagreeing with that is the only avenue I can see to it being a No True Scotsman?
When the original sentence is read by someone who knows nothing about either, i.e., a mind where it can still be true or false, the argument to sway them one way or the other is a No True Scotsman or Appeal to Authority.
"I hold position X, and everyone who is smart agrees with X."
If nobody truly knowledgeable could disagree, then anyone who disagrees is therefore not one of the truly knowledgeable.