7 ms·

Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors, in this case namely support from makers of popular software and conten

Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors, in this case namely support from makers of popular software and content as well as social influence and documentation skills of creators. The person who pushed RSS to success (IMO) Dave Winer was superb at communicating and evangelizing his goals, connecting partners like Netscape and NYT, and documenting his work including the RSS related tools he built. His spec was “worse” in the sense that it was under specified but better in the sense that it achieved wide support (both in text and podcast form) among people who made content. This is partly because Dave had first an influential email newsletter and Wired column (DaveNet) and second an influential very early blog Scripting News. He had also been working with news companies for years at prior startups. He could write well. He showed up for and arranged meetings with people who did not at first understand the need for something like rss. He was clear and relentless in his promotion which was borne out of what seemed to be a genuine desire for open standards in this area rather than greed / trying to do lock in. People with technical backgrounds in places like this tend to fixate on the technical aspects of Atom vs RSS. There is no question Atom is more technically correct. There is also no question (IMO) it came too late and focused on the wrong things — being correct and complete at the expense of being complicated and hard to understand — and more importantly was led and promoted by people who lacked the social skills to make it popular outside of technical circles. (These folks could be brutal about rss's flaws without seeming to have awareness of this shortcoming in their own effort.)

treve 3y ago
Almost any reader and platform supports both so I don't even know why the discussion is relevant. If you have a preference, use it and feed readers will likely just work.
talideon 3y ago
The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements. At that point, I can't fathom what advantages there is to the producer to not just produce an Atom feed. RSS 1.0 was basically the first attempt to produce something like Atom without reinventing too much, but Dave threw his toys out of the pram, so the only option was to reinvent it with a different name and clean up the remaining sharp corners. It's tragically funny. Atom is both more correct and easier to produce and parse than any RSS variant. Were I to join Automattic in the morning, the first thing I'd try is to attempt to get them to abandon their weird RSS mashup as their default feed format. There's no good reason why Wordpress still generates RSS feeds. Yes, I'm a bit bitter, but I was in the feed wars, and it still stings.
- rcade 3y ago
  Atom is a great feed format with a rock-solid spec. I wouldn't call it a weird mashup for WordPress to use atom:link in their RSS feeds. It does things no RSS element can do, such as allow a feed to identify its own URL. For those who don't know, every WordPress site with an RSS feed also has an Atom feed available by adding "/atom" to the end of the RSS feed URL, such as this: RSS feed: https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/ https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/ Atom feed: https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/atom/ https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/atom/
- ttepasse 3y ago
  > The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements. Interestingly enough you can’t to do the reverse: because RSS never got a proper XML namespace, its elements can’t be embedded into other XML. I can understand that the early RSS 0.9x efforts didn’t do XML namespaces since those were rather new then, but the publication of RSS 2.0 could have been the right moment to introduce one, I think.
- toyg 3y ago
  > I can't fathom what advantages The advantage is that the imported Atom bits will be namespaced, so an old client can decide to ignore them and just treat the feed as RSS. In format wars, wider compatibility tends to win, even if the overall standard is just worse. Developers are lazy.
DonHopkins 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728020 DonHopkins on May 11, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] [...] The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!" The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.
- eduction 3y ago
  Ya I remember this period. A lot of people got caught up in these types of questions. “What if you want to put an unescaped greater than symbol in your post title??” People spent years on this sort of pedantry. Meanwhile Dave added enclosures and popularized podcasting making RSS even more important. He knew where to focus and what mattered.
throw0101c 3y ago
> Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors Or perhaps having at six year head start (RSS 0.90, 1999; Atom, 2005) and having it compound. This includes podcasting, as the term was coined in 2004, but which was happening even before that (and before Atom was finalized): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology First mover advantage, leading to network effects, can be a thing.
- acdha 3y ago
  I’d also add Google dropping reader and trying to force open web content into various proprietary schemes. Atom’s many improvements over RSS didn’t matter as much when the oxygen was getting sucked out of the room and few people were investing more time in feeds.
- westurner 3y ago
  RSS > RSS compared with Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom CDATA > CDATA in XML: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document, so CDATA tags (to prevent XSS) didn't work; and the issue remains with content syndication: feed elements should somehow HTML escape their content to prevent XSS (arbitrary JS on a different Origin) XSS: Cross-site Scripting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting Same-origin policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o... Content Security Policy (CSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP CSRF: Cross-site request forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery JSONP > CSRF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forge... The whole internet was broken, and RSS helped us realize it: the one-way, one-time syndication advantage. These days it's all about https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/CreativeWork JSON-LD instead of RDFa, which you can try to sanitize with Mozilla/bleach like arbitrary HTML in comments on the page.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors I don't follow. Out there in the world, RSS feeds provide their feeds in Atom format. The technical format is called "Atom" and the functionality that the Atom format implements is called "RSS". In what sense did technically-correct Atom get trumped by anything? This is like complaining that social factors caused "the SAT" to get trumped by "standardized testing".
- majormajor 3y ago
  > Out there in the world, RSS feeds provide their feeds in Atom format. I just checked a few of the ones I follow, and ... turns out I don't immediately know how to distinguish when there's not a specific xml namespace reference in the doc or such. But according to Wikipedia the RFC822 timestamps I'm seeing suggest they're RSS2 instead of Atom?
  - re 3y ago
    > turns out I don't immediately know how to distinguish Atom feeds will almost always have <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> as the root element. In some cases they may use namespace prefixes but that tends to be rarer and less interoperable. RSS feeds have an <rss version="2.0"> root element.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      In that case the four I spot checked were all RSS, I guess. Though some of them had other references to atom things within them.
- eloisant 3y ago
  RSS and Atom are 2 different formats. Your confusion probably comes from the fact that RSS is older, so it's sometimes used as the name of the functionality but it's improper. They're 2 different formats.
  - 3y ago

treve 3y ago

Almost any reader and platform supports both so I don't even know why the discussion is relevant. If you have a preference, use it and feed readers will likely just work.

talideon 3y ago

The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements. At that point, I can't fathom what advantages there is to the producer to not just produce an Atom feed. RSS 1.0 was basically the first attempt to produce something like Atom without reinventing too much, but Dave threw his toys out of the pram, so the only option was to reinvent it with a different name and clean up the remaining sharp corners. It's tragically funny. Atom is both more correct and easier to produce and parse than any RSS variant. Were I to join Automattic in the morning, the first thing I'd try is to attempt to get them to abandon their weird RSS mashup as their default feed format. There's no good reason why Wordpress still generates RSS feeds. Yes, I'm a bit bitter, but I was in the feed wars, and it still stings.

rcade 3y ago
Atom is a great feed format with a rock-solid spec. I wouldn't call it a weird mashup for WordPress to use atom:link in their RSS feeds. It does things no RSS element can do, such as allow a feed to identify its own URL. For those who don't know, every WordPress site with an RSS feed also has an Atom feed available by adding "/atom" to the end of the RSS feed URL, such as this: RSS feed: https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/ https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/ Atom feed: https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/atom/ https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/atom/
ttepasse 3y ago
> The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements. Interestingly enough you can’t to do the reverse: because RSS never got a proper XML namespace, its elements can’t be embedded into other XML. I can understand that the early RSS 0.9x efforts didn’t do XML namespaces since those were rather new then, but the publication of RSS 2.0 could have been the right moment to introduce one, I think.
toyg 3y ago
> I can't fathom what advantages The advantage is that the imported Atom bits will be namespaced, so an old client can decide to ignore them and just treat the feed as RSS. In format wars, wider compatibility tends to win, even if the overall standard is just worse. Developers are lazy.

DonHopkins 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728020 DonHopkins on May 11, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] [...] The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!" The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.

eduction 3y ago
Ya I remember this period. A lot of people got caught up in these types of questions. “What if you want to put an unescaped greater than symbol in your post title??” People spent years on this sort of pedantry. Meanwhile Dave added enclosures and popularized podcasting making RSS even more important. He knew where to focus and what mattered.

throw0101c 3y ago

> Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors Or perhaps having at six year head start (RSS 0.90, 1999; Atom, 2005) and having it compound. This includes podcasting, as the term was coined in 2004, but which was happening even before that (and before Atom was finalized): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology First mover advantage, leading to network effects, can be a thing.

acdha 3y ago
I’d also add Google dropping reader and trying to force open web content into various proprietary schemes. Atom’s many improvements over RSS didn’t matter as much when the oxygen was getting sucked out of the room and few people were investing more time in feeds.
westurner 3y ago
RSS > RSS compared with Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom CDATA > CDATA in XML: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document, so CDATA tags (to prevent XSS) didn't work; and the issue remains with content syndication: feed elements should somehow HTML escape their content to prevent XSS (arbitrary JS on a different Origin) XSS: Cross-site Scripting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting Same-origin policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o... Content Security Policy (CSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP CSRF: Cross-site request forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery JSONP > CSRF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forge... The whole internet was broken, and RSS helped us realize it: the one-way, one-time syndication advantage. These days it's all about https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/CreativeWork JSON-LD instead of RDFa, which you can try to sanitize with Mozilla/bleach like arbitrary HTML in comments on the page.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors I don't follow. Out there in the world, RSS feeds provide their feeds in Atom format. The technical format is called "Atom" and the functionality that the Atom format implements is called "RSS". In what sense did technically-correct Atom get trumped by anything? This is like complaining that social factors caused "the SAT" to get trumped by "standardized testing".

majormajor 3y ago
> Out there in the world, RSS feeds provide their feeds in Atom format. I just checked a few of the ones I follow, and ... turns out I don't immediately know how to distinguish when there's not a specific xml namespace reference in the doc or such. But according to Wikipedia the RFC822 timestamps I'm seeing suggest they're RSS2 instead of Atom?
- re 3y ago
  > turns out I don't immediately know how to distinguish Atom feeds will almost always have <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> as the root element. In some cases they may use namespace prefixes but that tends to be rarer and less interoperable. RSS feeds have an <rss version="2.0"> root element.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    In that case the four I spot checked were all RSS, I guess. Though some of them had other references to atom things within them.
eloisant 3y ago
RSS and Atom are 2 different formats. Your confusion probably comes from the fact that RSS is older, so it's sometimes used as the name of the functionality but it's improper. They're 2 different formats.
- 3y ago