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The TLDR is RSS is messy shit while Atom is well specified and works for anything you need outside of podcasts. As long as you don’t need to consume feeds, jus
by masklinn 3y ago
The TLDR is RSS is messy shit while Atom is well specified and works for anything you need outside of podcasts.
As long as you don’t need to consume feeds, just use atom.
The less TL is that RSS1 and RSS2 are basically two different branches of the original:
- Netscape released RSS 0.90 as an RDF application (RSS literally stood for RDF Site Summary)
- RSS 1.0 was an update / direct evolution of RSS 0.90 by a dedicated working group using final RDF 1.0 semantics (as RSS 0.90 had been based on an earlier working draft)
- RSS 1.1 an evolution of RSS 1.0 by unrelated people
This is called the RDF branch, for obvious reasons.
However a few months after RSS 0.90 Netscape also released RSS 0.91, which dropped RDF entirely, rebranded to “Really Simple Syndication”, and added some elements from Userland’s own syndication format.
This is the start of the “Harvard” (formerly “Userland”) branch, Userland / Dave Winer released his own variant of 0.91 (timeline with netscape has never been super clear to me), then went on to release 0.92 with an <enclosure> element, followed by 0.93 and 0.94. He then released RSS 2.0 to mark a bit of a compatibility break, as RSS 2.0 adds namespace support and removes some elements from his 0.9, and also to fuck with the RSS WG’s 1.0 release.
Because the Harvard branch was the first to support enclosures (embedding audio) and Userland had built support for that, it became the de-facto format for podcast feeds, Atom also supports enclosures but I’m not sure any podcast client (or podcasting source) supports them.
- talideon 3y ago> As long as you don’t need to consume feeds, just use atom. Nah, you should just use Atom. The only vaguely good reason to use RSS is spotty Atom support in podcast apps. So, better formulation: only bother with RSS if you're a podcast.
- masklinn 3y agoIf you’re a feed client / consumer, you will have to parse RSS eventually, sadly.
- pferde 3y agoWhile RSS is, as you say, quite messy, Atom has also brought lots of headaches to this poor feed aggregator developer over the years. Its specification is a lot tighter than RSS', but there is still enough wiggle room for feed generators to get creative and make you want to strangle somebody.
- jgalt212 3y agosounds like Postel's law in play, but I agree it's annoying that there are incorrect / bad atom emitters. https://ardalis.com/postels-law-robustness-principle/ https://ardalis.com/postels-law-robustness-principle/
- throw0101c 3y agoPerhaps time for RFC4287bis to tighten up the grey areas? Are there specific things that come to mind as specifically annoying?
- pferde 3y agoIt's been a long time since I spent my time on that, so I do not remember anything specific. But it was difficult figuring out reliably if a post in a given feed matched an already existing (locally cached) post, whether it was an updated version of that post, or whether if it was a completely new, hitherto unseen post, so it had something to do with the post IDs, timestamps and URLs.
- ttepasse 3y agoI believe iTunes/Podcasts since its beginning also supported Atom podcasts until they deprecated it some years ago. But I believe they were some of the very few.