6 ms·

Why Atom was created

41 points by davewiner 16y ago

blasdel 16y ago
Atom exists because everything Dave Winer touches becomes a clusterfuck, overwhelmed with problems both technical (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss) and social (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer_number http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...). The rest of us needed a format free from his influence or control, one with comprehensive specifications that he couldn't silently edit ('frozen' doesn't apply to him). Please stop producing any flavor of RSS. Absolutely stop producing the same content in multiple formats, that's just inane. I am not not aware of any software not written by and for Dave that cannot parse Atom (iTunes does handle Atom podcast feeds, but they must be valid to work). If you really care about ancient clients, run your Atom feeds through Feedburner, they can take care of it for you: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78971 http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
- ericflo 16y ago
  You may have an argument here, but your ad-hominem attack made me tune out pretty much immediately.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    It's not an attack on him, it's a warning to others. All these technologies are yours, except those that Dave Winer claims ownership of. Attempt no landing there.
    - davewiner 16y ago
      You can't back that up with anything I ever said or "claimed." I and my company disclaimed ownership of everything, even the copyright on the spec I wrote.
- bl4k 16y ago
  1. There are only really 4 versions of RSS, and Winer wrote two of them. There were 3 different groups involved, which was the problem - the problem isn't having newer versions. 2. You could say the same of Mark Pilgrim's social problems. He is very difficult to get along with, is very arrogant and lead a crusade against Winer for years. He on one hand argued that RSS was fragmented and incompatible, but his solution to that was to start yet another syndication format. You are forgetting that what made syndication popular was the simplicity of RSS. There were other formats before it, and there have been formats since - but the ease of implementation and simplicity of RSS ushered in a whole new era of services and nothing less than blogging itself, podcasting and all the services since that have built on that foundation (ie. 'the social web').
  - peterstjohn 16y ago
    That's not all that fair on Mark (who yes, can be just as bad) - there was a desire to fix things within RSS 2.0, but Winer refused to update the spec to fix things like the Reuters problem. Atom seemed like the only way to move things forward at the time...
  - blasdel 16y ago
    There may ideally be only 4 versions of RSS, but Winer was responsible for 6 of them :) Mark may be an asshole, but he's nearly always correct (save for his recent Apple II fixation), and he follows up instead of trying to edit his mistakes from the record. He has a lot of company in hating Winer, basically everyone Dave's ever worked on anything with. Here's some examples of classic Dave: http://www.metafilter.com/26701/ http://www.metafilter.com/26701/ http://www.metafilter.com/33699/ http://www.metafilter.com/33699/ http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/ http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/ (note that rcade, the author of the last link, was Dave's sole defender in the earlier ones). Here's some freshly curated ridiculousness: http://eyeonwiner.org/ http://eyeonwiner.org/ http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/ http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/ RSS is no simpler than Atom, not even when used naïvely — it's just easier to break. It was successful because Winer was at one time successful, but after he managed to attack and alienate everyone else in the field, they moved on and started over with a clean slate.
- davewiner 16y ago
  Okay why does this get moderated up to 22 points if Hacker News is such a respectful place. I don't know who this guy is and what axes he has to grind (and the 22 people who think this is an important comment), but RSS is a huge success, anything but a "clusterfuck." And River2 fully supports Atom. That's just outrageous that you say my software doesn't support it.
lutorm 16y ago
Beginning to read that story, the only Atom I could think of was the processor... which I quickly realized was not what they were talking about. It seems this is a case of failing to see your post like your readers will, without some preexisting context...
dochtman 16y ago
So is the "davewiner" account here a sockpuppet? It wouldn't seem to make much sense for the real Dave Winer to post this here.
- blasdel 16y ago
  Yes, it's him (who else would submit his posts?). He's got several accounts: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brilliant http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brilliant
  - Groxx 16y ago
    In the about section: >One of Dave Winer's many handles. (I can never remember my password so I create a different account on every machine I use and stay logged in. Sorry.) Jeez, give OpenID a try, or use a password manager. Both of which are also significantly more secure options than adding more passwords to your own memory / relying on stale cookies.
    - ciupicri 16y ago
      OpenID didn't work too well an year ago. I don't remember the details, but it was enough to make me not use it even if I use it whenever I can.
      - Groxx 16y ago
        * shrug * it's been working flawlessly for me everywhere I've used it, and it makes the sign-up process easier. The one complaint (and it's a big one) is that it makes it very hard to have multiple OpenID accounts on a site. You have to log out of your "current" one, and into the one you want. I can see no reason this can't be changed with a plugin, but it's still a PITA.
        ciupicri 16y ago
        In case I wasn't clear enough: I didn't like the OpenID implementation from HN. The one from StackOverflow worked fine.
masklinn 16y ago
ATTN: realize that the StackOverflow question dates back to 2008. Also, iTunes has supported Atom feeds since iTunes 6 (October 2005) if not earlier so the linked stackoverflow comment was wrong even as it was posted, two years ago. If iTunes refuses to consume your Atom feed, it's likely because your feed is broken and doesn't validate.
aberkowitz 16y ago
I don't see why anybody should bother with Atom anymore. Are there any applications that exclusively support Atom over RSS?
- simonw 16y ago
  Ever tried to include an ampersand in an entry title in an RSS feed? The RSS 2.0 spec still doesn't specify if the title should be HTML encoded or not, and the implementations tend to disagree as a result. This is why my apps always produce Atom, never RSS. Edit: Here's an article that illustrates the problem: http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2006/06/encoding-rss-titles http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2006/06/encoding-rss-titl... - this kind of unresolved ambiguity in the RSS spec is one of the main reasons Atom was needed.
  - davewiner 16y ago
    XML tells you what to do there. It says it very plainly in the RSS 2.0 spec. "RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website." Pretty sure the W3C tells you how to encode an ampersand in XML. If not, your quarrel is with them, not RSS.
    - davewiner 16y ago
      Why did this get moderated down? It's a serious point. The complaint isn't even a nitpick, it's covered. It's like saying every program has to define arithmetic if it's going to add two numbers together. No, it doesn't. That's the job of the processor.
      - blasdel 16y ago
        How do you still not understand this, 7 years later? The RSS specs you defined do not allow the author to specify the type of text contained within an element — the processor has to guess whether it was plain text or HTML based on how many levels of escaping were applied.

41 points by davewiner 16y ago

Atom exists because everything Dave Winer touches becomes a clusterfuck, overwhelmed with problems both technical (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss) and social (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer_number http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...). The rest of us needed a format free from his influence or control, one with comprehensive specifications that he couldn't silently edit ('frozen' doesn't apply to him). Please stop producing any flavor of RSS. Absolutely stop producing the same content in multiple formats, that's just inane. I am not not aware of any software not written by and for Dave that cannot parse Atom (iTunes does handle Atom podcast feeds, but they must be valid to work). If you really care about ancient clients, run your Atom feeds through Feedburner, they can take care of it for you: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78971 http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

ericflo 16y ago
You may have an argument here, but your ad-hominem attack made me tune out pretty much immediately.
- blasdel 16y ago
  It's not an attack on him, it's a warning to others. All these technologies are yours, except those that Dave Winer claims ownership of. Attempt no landing there.
  - davewiner 16y ago
    You can't back that up with anything I ever said or "claimed." I and my company disclaimed ownership of everything, even the copyright on the spec I wrote.
bl4k 16y ago
1. There are only really 4 versions of RSS, and Winer wrote two of them. There were 3 different groups involved, which was the problem - the problem isn't having newer versions. 2. You could say the same of Mark Pilgrim's social problems. He is very difficult to get along with, is very arrogant and lead a crusade against Winer for years. He on one hand argued that RSS was fragmented and incompatible, but his solution to that was to start yet another syndication format. You are forgetting that what made syndication popular was the simplicity of RSS. There were other formats before it, and there have been formats since - but the ease of implementation and simplicity of RSS ushered in a whole new era of services and nothing less than blogging itself, podcasting and all the services since that have built on that foundation (ie. 'the social web').
- peterstjohn 16y ago
  That's not all that fair on Mark (who yes, can be just as bad) - there was a desire to fix things within RSS 2.0, but Winer refused to update the spec to fix things like the Reuters problem. Atom seemed like the only way to move things forward at the time...
- blasdel 16y ago
  There may ideally be only 4 versions of RSS, but Winer was responsible for 6 of them :) Mark may be an asshole, but he's nearly always correct (save for his recent Apple II fixation), and he follows up instead of trying to edit his mistakes from the record. He has a lot of company in hating Winer, basically everyone Dave's ever worked on anything with. Here's some examples of classic Dave: http://www.metafilter.com/26701/ http://www.metafilter.com/26701/ http://www.metafilter.com/33699/ http://www.metafilter.com/33699/ http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/ http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/ (note that rcade, the author of the last link, was Dave's sole defender in the earlier ones). Here's some freshly curated ridiculousness: http://eyeonwiner.org/ http://eyeonwiner.org/ http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/ http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/ RSS is no simpler than Atom, not even when used naïvely — it's just easier to break. It was successful because Winer was at one time successful, but after he managed to attack and alienate everyone else in the field, they moved on and started over with a clean slate.
davewiner 16y ago
Okay why does this get moderated up to 22 points if Hacker News is such a respectful place. I don't know who this guy is and what axes he has to grind (and the 22 people who think this is an important comment), but RSS is a huge success, anything but a "clusterfuck." And River2 fully supports Atom. That's just outrageous that you say my software doesn't support it.

lutorm 16y ago

Beginning to read that story, the only Atom I could think of was the processor... which I quickly realized was not what they were talking about. It seems this is a case of failing to see your post like your readers will, without some preexisting context...

dochtman 16y ago

So is the "davewiner" account here a sockpuppet? It wouldn't seem to make much sense for the real Dave Winer to post this here.

blasdel 16y ago
Yes, it's him (who else would submit his posts?). He's got several accounts: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brilliant http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brilliant
- Groxx 16y ago
  In the about section: >One of Dave Winer's many handles. (I can never remember my password so I create a different account on every machine I use and stay logged in. Sorry.) Jeez, give OpenID a try, or use a password manager. Both of which are also significantly more secure options than adding more passwords to your own memory / relying on stale cookies.
  - ciupicri 16y ago
    OpenID didn't work too well an year ago. I don't remember the details, but it was enough to make me not use it even if I use it whenever I can.
    - Groxx 16y ago
      * shrug * it's been working flawlessly for me everywhere I've used it, and it makes the sign-up process easier. The one complaint (and it's a big one) is that it makes it very hard to have multiple OpenID accounts on a site. You have to log out of your "current" one, and into the one you want. I can see no reason this can't be changed with a plugin, but it's still a PITA.
      - ciupicri 16y ago
        In case I wasn't clear enough: I didn't like the OpenID implementation from HN. The one from StackOverflow worked fine.

masklinn 16y ago

ATTN: realize that the StackOverflow question dates back to 2008. Also, iTunes has supported Atom feeds since iTunes 6 (October 2005) if not earlier so the linked stackoverflow comment was wrong even as it was posted, two years ago. If iTunes refuses to consume your Atom feed, it's likely because your feed is broken and doesn't validate.

aberkowitz 16y ago

I don't see why anybody should bother with Atom anymore. Are there any applications that exclusively support Atom over RSS?

simonw 16y ago
Ever tried to include an ampersand in an entry title in an RSS feed? The RSS 2.0 spec still doesn't specify if the title should be HTML encoded or not, and the implementations tend to disagree as a result. This is why my apps always produce Atom, never RSS. Edit: Here's an article that illustrates the problem: http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2006/06/encoding-rss-titles http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2006/06/encoding-rss-titl... - this kind of unresolved ambiguity in the RSS spec is one of the main reasons Atom was needed.
- davewiner 16y ago
  XML tells you what to do there. It says it very plainly in the RSS 2.0 spec. "RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website." Pretty sure the W3C tells you how to encode an ampersand in XML. If not, your quarrel is with them, not RSS.
  - davewiner 16y ago
    Why did this get moderated down? It's a serious point. The complaint isn't even a nitpick, it's covered. It's like saying every program has to define arithmetic if it's going to add two numbers together. No, it doesn't. That's the job of the processor.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      How do you still not understand this, 7 years later? The RSS specs you defined do not allow the author to specify the type of text contained within an element — the processor has to guess whether it was plain text or HTML based on how many levels of escaping were applied.