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I suggest using Atom instead and avoiding a whole lot of confusion and drama by not implementing RSS 2.0.

kevincox 3y ago
I suggest publishing with Atom. However if you are consuming feeds you will probably want to support RSS 2.0 as well as various buggy implementations and some earlier RSS versions.
chrismorgan 3y ago
Yep. Use RSS if you’re dealing with podcasting, because most of those platforms don’t support Atom (and it’s basically all Apple’s fault—they took over and froze the space at a certain point in time just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS), but use Atom for all other feeds, because it’s just hands-down better than RSS, in ways that occasionally even matter (as in, will cause some software to mangle your content, most commonly your titles if you use stuff that could look like HTML).
- throw0101a 3y ago
  A requirements update from August 2022: > Apple Podcasts will make the following updates to RSS feed requirements in 2023: […] > Atom feeds > Update: No longer supported > New shows in Atom feed format will no longer be accepted and any remaining shows will no longer be updated. * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-hosting-providers https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host... WTF Apple? AFAICT Google Podcasts is doing the same as Apple and only using RSS 2.0. Nothing is stopping people from providing both RSS 2.0 and Atom, and given that most feeds are probably auto-generated, probably not hard to do so, but it is disappointing.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    Apple and Google did this because (1) alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used, and (2) a few years ago, the podcasting industry and standards bodies chose to require RSS for extensions/enhancements.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used What? I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based.
      - chrismorgan 3y ago
        (You’re making me cringe, calling Atom feeds RSS feeds. Just “feeds” is a perfectly good word.)
        JohnFen 3y ago
        Sorry about that. I didn't know that was a thing that made people cringe.
        chrismorgan 3y ago
        Feeds are the generic concept, and RSS and Atom are two different implementations of the concept. It’s like googling something using Bing.
      - CharlesW 3y ago
        > I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based. Meaning, they have an `atom` namespace declaration? Because that's very common in RSS feeds, and is required for Podcast Standards Project-compliant feeds. Apple supports RSS feeds that use the `atom` namespace.
        JohnFen 3y ago
        I thought they were the actual Atom specification, but perhaps not. I haven't actually looked at the XML in a long time.
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
      Atom wasn’t being used in podcasting because it wasn’t supported by key podcasting platforms! I know from my research of multiple entities that tried to use Atom (since it’s obviously and unambiguously superior), particularly because of some things that claimed Atom was supported, but gave up because it turned out that even most of the platform things that claimed support didn’t actually support it, either at all or fully. As for things like JSON Feed, that’s never been a serious contender. This Apple Podcasts update saying “we no longer support Atom” genuinely surprises me, because when I looked a couple of years ago, as far as I could tell as an outsider with no access to any of their software, they didn’t support Atom, and never had. I’m not certain what you’re referring to as “the podcasting industry and standards bodies”, since I haven’t been paying attention to the space (a couple of years back it seemed a bleak wilderness). If it’s things like https://podstandards.org/ https://podstandards.org/, well, “Apple has created some thoughtful vendor-specific extensions to the RSS standard”… bleh. I cannot understand how anyone could have anything but scorn for the mess that is podcasting RSS. It’s shamefully bad, and the paragraphs there are rather baffling to me in their untempered praise for Apple and condemnation of (unspecified) others. As for their standard, they’re explicitly standards-washing certain Apple interests (though I will admit that most of the iTunes namespace stuff is generally useful), adding stuff that has no place in a “required standard” (funding!? And what happened to the <link rel> mechanism for some of that stuff, which would obviously be appropriate? There really looks to be a lot of poorly-thought out stuff in this).
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Podcasting uses RSS because alternatives like Atom and JSON Feed don't solve a problem in this space. New podcasting standards (Podcast Standards Project, Podcasting 2.0) are supported by extending RSS, which is now explicitly required. (Apple is just a consumer of RSS — they don't use RSS between their back-end and their podcast app.)
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    RSS is an awful mess. Atom was invented in significant part to fix the problems of RSS (things like the content encoding disaster), and it succeeded. Except that, while everyone else accepted it (most things use Atom rather than RSS, admittedly with a few rather notable and massive holdouts), the podcasting industry ignored it. The way RSS and especially podcasting RSS just pulls in bits and pieces from everywhere haphazardly, regularly ending up expressing the same thing three or four times, is an indictment against it. And if making <atom:link> mandatory doesn’t make you boggle (pulling in one element from the competing and superior standard, in what is at the very least a very mild abuse of the XML namespace—not that RSS cares about XML conventions on namespaces), nothing will.
safety1st 3y ago
The drama around it is awkward, but I think Winer has a point about the success of RSS being at least partially attributable to it not changing. The immediate analogy that springs to mind is email, also archaic, also widely adopted, you don't have to fear that there will be breaking changes or some company will decide it's going away tomorrow. You just use it and it works. (RSS actually had that apocalyptic moment when Google Reader shut down, did it die? Nope.) The net result is that RSS is low maintenance, the implementations out there are stable and have been around for years, very little work needs to be done on code which deals with RSS, millions of websites continue using it and no one has to lose any sleep over it. Not that I wouldn't like to see any improvements at all. It would be nice if these guys could set aside their differences and say look, we'll do an update of some kind and increment the major version by 1, say, every 10-15 years. Yes that's practically glacial in Internet time, maybe that's actually good.

I suggest publishing with Atom. However if you are consuming feeds you will probably want to support RSS 2.0 as well as various buggy implementations and some earlier RSS versions.

chrismorgan 3y ago

Yep. Use RSS if you’re dealing with podcasting, because most of those platforms don’t support Atom (and it’s basically all Apple’s fault—they took over and froze the space at a certain point in time just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS), but use Atom for all other feeds, because it’s just hands-down better than RSS, in ways that occasionally even matter (as in, will cause some software to mangle your content, most commonly your titles if you use stuff that could look like HTML).

throw0101a 3y ago
A requirements update from August 2022: > Apple Podcasts will make the following updates to RSS feed requirements in 2023: […] > Atom feeds > Update: No longer supported > New shows in Atom feed format will no longer be accepted and any remaining shows will no longer be updated. * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-hosting-providers https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host... WTF Apple? AFAICT Google Podcasts is doing the same as Apple and only using RSS 2.0. Nothing is stopping people from providing both RSS 2.0 and Atom, and given that most feeds are probably auto-generated, probably not hard to do so, but it is disappointing.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Apple and Google did this because (1) alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used, and (2) a few years ago, the podcasting industry and standards bodies chose to require RSS for extensions/enhancements.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used What? I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based.
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
      (You’re making me cringe, calling Atom feeds RSS feeds. Just “feeds” is a perfectly good word.)
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Sorry about that. I didn't know that was a thing that made people cringe.
        chrismorgan 3y ago
        Feeds are the generic concept, and RSS and Atom are two different implementations of the concept. It’s like googling something using Bing.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based. Meaning, they have an `atom` namespace declaration? Because that's very common in RSS feeds, and is required for Podcast Standards Project-compliant feeds. Apple supports RSS feeds that use the `atom` namespace.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        I thought they were the actual Atom specification, but perhaps not. I haven't actually looked at the XML in a long time.
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    Atom wasn’t being used in podcasting because it wasn’t supported by key podcasting platforms! I know from my research of multiple entities that tried to use Atom (since it’s obviously and unambiguously superior), particularly because of some things that claimed Atom was supported, but gave up because it turned out that even most of the platform things that claimed support didn’t actually support it, either at all or fully. As for things like JSON Feed, that’s never been a serious contender. This Apple Podcasts update saying “we no longer support Atom” genuinely surprises me, because when I looked a couple of years ago, as far as I could tell as an outsider with no access to any of their software, they didn’t support Atom, and never had. I’m not certain what you’re referring to as “the podcasting industry and standards bodies”, since I haven’t been paying attention to the space (a couple of years back it seemed a bleak wilderness). If it’s things like https://podstandards.org/ https://podstandards.org/, well, “Apple has created some thoughtful vendor-specific extensions to the RSS standard”… bleh. I cannot understand how anyone could have anything but scorn for the mess that is podcasting RSS. It’s shamefully bad, and the paragraphs there are rather baffling to me in their untempered praise for Apple and condemnation of (unspecified) others. As for their standard, they’re explicitly standards-washing certain Apple interests (though I will admit that most of the iTunes namespace stuff is generally useful), adding stuff that has no place in a “required standard” (funding!? And what happened to the <link rel> mechanism for some of that stuff, which would obviously be appropriate? There really looks to be a lot of poorly-thought out stuff in this).
CharlesW 3y ago
Podcasting uses RSS because alternatives like Atom and JSON Feed don't solve a problem in this space. New podcasting standards (Podcast Standards Project, Podcasting 2.0) are supported by extending RSS, which is now explicitly required. (Apple is just a consumer of RSS — they don't use RSS between their back-end and their podcast app.)
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  RSS is an awful mess. Atom was invented in significant part to fix the problems of RSS (things like the content encoding disaster), and it succeeded. Except that, while everyone else accepted it (most things use Atom rather than RSS, admittedly with a few rather notable and massive holdouts), the podcasting industry ignored it. The way RSS and especially podcasting RSS just pulls in bits and pieces from everywhere haphazardly, regularly ending up expressing the same thing three or four times, is an indictment against it. And if making <atom:link> mandatory doesn’t make you boggle (pulling in one element from the competing and superior standard, in what is at the very least a very mild abuse of the XML namespace—not that RSS cares about XML conventions on namespaces), nothing will.

safety1st 3y ago

The drama around it is awkward, but I think Winer has a point about the success of RSS being at least partially attributable to it not changing. The immediate analogy that springs to mind is email, also archaic, also widely adopted, you don't have to fear that there will be breaking changes or some company will decide it's going away tomorrow. You just use it and it works. (RSS actually had that apocalyptic moment when Google Reader shut down, did it die? Nope.) The net result is that RSS is low maintenance, the implementations out there are stable and have been around for years, very little work needs to be done on code which deals with RSS, millions of websites continue using it and no one has to lose any sleep over it. Not that I wouldn't like to see any improvements at all. It would be nice if these guys could set aside their differences and say look, we'll do an update of some kind and increment the major version by 1, say, every 10-15 years. Yes that's practically glacial in Internet time, maybe that's actually good.