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Introduction to Atom
- j16sdiz 5mo agoTIL FeedBurner still exists: https://feedburner.google.com/ https://feedburner.google.com/
- kevincox 5mo agoKind of. It is now really just a caching proxy making it mostly useless. Although I have found it occasionally useful for sites that have over-active bot-blocking on their feeds because Feedburner is often whitelisted.
- mplanchard 5mo agoI hand-rolled an atom feed for my statically generated blog. It’s a reasonable, easy format to work with.
- perrohunter 5mo agowhat is old is new again?
- hnlmorg 5mo agoNo, this is just old. Pity though. RSS / Atom was a fantastic concept and it’s a real pity big tech killed them off.
- rambambram 5mo agoNothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.
- geodel 5mo agoAgreed. That nowadays people or even big companies find it outside their core competency to host their blog, have atom/RSS feeds is not because big tech killing it.
- ushimitsudoki 5mo ago[dead]
- holistio 5mo agoIs there any platform for sharing what feeds we follow? Would love to discover some new blogs.
- manuelmoreale 5mo agoClosest thing I can think of is this one: https://feedland.org https://feedland.org Or you create a blog for yourself and you make a blogroll. As for discovering new blogs, couple of options but there are more out there: https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory, https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/
- rambambram 5mo agoWell, my guess is that OPML is underrated. And I understand that, because it's so different from the social media that we are used to. On my homepage (link in bio) you can find all the feeds that I follow, available as an OPML file. It might be of interest to you, it might not (probably a lot of blogs you know from here, at least half of my 2000 feeds). One 'dream' of me is to have OPML be the discovery-glue between all kinds of individual personal websites and blogs. But this requires critical mass to have enough to discover and explore, and it needs some fun/interesting software way to do that.
- darreninthenet 5mo agoHow do you curate and keep on top of so many feeds? I have ~10 on my RSS reader and I sometimes have trouble keeping up if I have a couple of busy days
- bawolff 5mo agoMeh. Big tech didnt kill it off, it was already dead at that point. Sometimes things just arent popular no matter how much we might want it to be.
- pletnes 5mo agoLots of sites publish outages, incidents, downtime over RSS/atom. Works great for monitoring, post them into slack with a bot and you can start a discussion thread about that incident where you first hear about it.
- intrasight 5mo agoFirst iteration of Google's APIs were atom. I do miss XML.
- abustamam 5mo agoOne of the API providers I use at work returns responses in XML and we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect. What do you like about XML? I feel like I'm missing something.
- refulgentis 5mo agoI don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary. In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries. > we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
- abustamam 5mo ago> useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for? > I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.
- jeroenhd 5mo ago> I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML I hear this too, but often when I ask why people say things like that, it's either because XML is "outdated" or because they don't like it. It's like programs written in C or C++: very few large projects chose those languages nowadays, often for good reasons, so the projects written in those languages are usually 10 to 20 years old. Age comes with a lot of legacy cruft and obscure behaviour, but that's not the fault of those languages per se. Or for people blasting banks for using COBOL, even though COBOL is a perfectly fine high-performance language for the niches bank mainframes serve.
- tkcranny 5mo agoI’m not clear on the difference between atom and RSS. Atom seemed to be the better spec, but for my Astro blog I ended up sticking to the built in `rss` helper it ships with.
- JimDabell 5mo agoIn the beginning was RSS 0.x. It was originally intended to be based on RDF. Compromises were made and it ended up dropping the RDF. The spec. wasn’t very good and had several ambiguities. Some people forged ahead with a cleaned up RDF-based version and called it RSS 1.0, while other people went ahead with the ambiguities but without RDF and called it RSS 2.0. The person publishing RSS 2.0 considered it finished and refused to update it. There was drama. A bunch of people decided that there was too much to clean up from within that mess and started a new format, Atom. This ended up being a much better spec. with an official RFC, but at this point everybody was calling any type of feed “RSS”, even if it was Atom. If you have the choice, you should pick Atom.
- kinow 5mo agoI also didn't know much of the difference between the two, and I also used RSS for my Hugo site. At the bottom of the article there's, under "See Also", a link to this page comparing RSS and Atom: https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#major https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared... It seems like the last update is from 2008, but the section on the differences has a few interesting items. I am not sure if it changed, but it says: "The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made (although the specification is under a Creative Commons licence) and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work." The Wikipedia RSS page has also a small section comparing RSS and Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom "Technically, Atom has several advantages: less restrictive licensing, IANA-registered MIME type, XML namespace, URI support, RELAX NG support.[35]"
- gabazing 5mo agoSame here. Astro has @astrojs/rss package but not atom. It should be an atom option in the same package or needed an @astrojs/atom package. There is an npm package called astrojs-atom but i am not use it is official or safe. Is there any astro core developer reading this, please add atom option addition to rss.
- drob518 5mo agoWell, that’s a blast from the past.
- rippeltippel 5mo agoAt this point, developers have named so many projects "Atom" that there are officially more Atoms in the world than there are atoms in the universe.
- echelon 5mo agoThis one is (was) pretty important. The hyperscalers stopped that timeline from winning, though.
- riffraff 5mo agoHow is this the hyperscalers fault? YouTube had atom feeds and I don't think Amazon and Microsoft have relevant syndication. Meta is surely responsible but that's it, imo.
- echelon 5mo agoGoogle on several occasions took moves to make the web less semantic. They dumped microformats and standards in favor of soupy error tolerant formats that benefitted their search engine and made it harder for other efforts to make information shareable and accessible. They wanted it to be easy to get information in, but for you to have to go through them to get information out.
- riffraff 5mo ago> They dumped microformats and standards I'm not sure they killed microformats, they still support hReview, hProduct etc, don't they? And they pushed schema.org. I wrote a trivial recipe importing tool that just works™ on a bunch of website because it uses the JSON-LD Recipe schema. It's ~100 lines and a ton simpler than what I had to write 15 years ago. Sure, they pushed for HTML5-style stuff, but that's not much of killing things. IMO it's not google that stopped microformats: it's that website owners realized most of the time it was advantaging third parties for no advantage to them.
- erk__ 5mo ago
- echelon 5mo agoIIRC, Aaron Swartz was one of the contributors to the format. RIP.
- el_io 5mo agoI remember him being contributor to the RSS format, why would he also contribute another similar format?
- eterevsky 5mo agoIt was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.
- brabel 5mo agoIIRC RSS 2.0 included most of what Atom has, no?
- talideon 5mo agoNot really, and it's still more error-prone than Atom. There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.
- gsnedders 5mo agoRSS 2.0 is kinda an unspecified mess, and at least 15 year ago, if you wanted to be compatible with the majority of content you needed some weird heuristics to detect which interpretation of the spec a given feed was using (lol). And Dave Winer was strongly against ever clarifying the spec, and that’s part of what led to Atom.
- riffraff 5mo agoI think it caught on well enough, platforms such as Wordpress still support it out of the box (I just checked my blog, it works). I liked Atom's clean design but it felt it was mostly pushed by Google (I may be misremembering) and in the end the syndicated web faded into obscurity anyway.
- ravenstine 5mo agoI thought it did in fact catch on but most people still referred to it as "RSS".
- johnny_reilly 5mo agoDocusaurus supports it out of the box as well https://docusaurus.io/blog/atom.xml https://docusaurus.io/blog/atom.xml
- eloisant 5mo ago
- bossyTeacher 5mo agoSo many words to choose and they had to choose one that already has been used before. Why are techies so devoid of imagination?
- jasonlotito 5mo agoIt's from more than 2 decades ago.
- eloisant 5mo agoWhat software used "Atom" before 2005?
- cxr 5mo ago(2005) <https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/commit/8ca2fd4e5a52015887799c347d8edcbcf4f6ac75 https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/commit/8ca2fd4e5a520158...>
- eduction 5mo agoAs a digital pedant I am very sympathetic to what prompted the creation of Atom. RSS2 for example under-specifies item "description" and "title," in particular how to put HTML in there, and using the most once-most-common technique (entity escaping HTML) makes it tricky to reliably do more basic things (encode/decode left angle brackets and ampersands, because now you don't know whether to do so singly or doubly). But the undeniable victory of RSS shows the importance of being first and "easy" (even when "easy" means sweeping edge case problems under the rug). And of humans: Major publishers like the New York Times had adopted RSS and saw no need to switch to Atom because it was good enough. I'd argue the (also underspecified) CSV format is another example of this phenomenon. (As for the entity escaping dilemma, people mostly just moved to using CDATA for their feed-embeded HTML, although I imagine people who write RSS readers still need to come up with semantics for figuring out if a title or description payload contains encoded html or not.)
- arjunthazhath 5mo agoIs this the same atom as that of Travis Kalanick?