Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Introducing Atom

When, in 2003, it became painfully clear that the RSS world was not going to declare a truce and agree to sort out the remaining problems—the competing formats being the biggest of them, the lack of documentation the second—a large group of interested developers split off to design a new format from the ground up. After much tooing, froing, cogitating, and argument, not least over the name of the thing, a format has arisen: the Atom Syndication Format.

Warning

At time of writing, the format is at Version 0.5, and this book is based on that version. It is hoped that by April 2005, the Atom format will reach a solid Version 1.0 and will be submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force as a proposed standard. You should therefore, after reading this chapter, consult the necessary web pages for the latest details. Changes will have been made, but nothing too drastic, I believe. Nevertheless, it is safer to warn you that what I am about to write may well be wrong by the time you come to read it.

This chapter is based on the standard found at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-05.txt, and the mailing list for discussing the syntax of the specification itself is at http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/index.html.

One key difference between the development of RSS and the development of Atom is that Atom’s whole design process is held out in the open, on the Atom-Syntax mailing list just mentioned and on the Atom wiki. The wiki (http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage ...