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Comments (24)

• jillesvangurp
  If you publish content, Atom is the superior format. All the parsers support it so there's no argument there against using it. You use it, everything should work just fine. There are no real downsides.The issue with RSS of course is that there is a lot of really crappy and ancient code out there that should have died a long time ago written in languages like PHP, Ruby, etc. by people who did not really care about details. Details like having unambiguous time stamps (what do you mean, you don't live in my time zone?), or details like "this text is not encoded in UTF-8 but in my unspecified locale specific ASCII variant" (why?!). Or indeed "this description contains malformed tag soup with some of the tags escaped".Also, while most modern RSS and Atom parsers are pretty decent, it's not that hard to find feeds that still have parsing issues despite these frameworks giving it their best effort. Part of the reason is that the code that generates these feeds is a lot less well covered by frameworks. Lots of content management systems out there that use some wonky templating, home grown scripts, or other improvised shit to generate their feeds. That always was the biggest problem.
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  encomiast
  Didn't we get enough of this fight 20 years ago? Let's not piss off Dave Winer again. Reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
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  ladax72707
  Most of the online content I consume comes to me either via RSS or Atom (I don't have numbers on the split). Not once have I thought - "Gosh darn it, this blog uses RSS instead of Atom, even though Atom is so obviously the better choice. Now I don't even want to add this blog to my feed." ...
• pavel_lishin
  The three ways of encoding the string "<xmp>" in the title all look like awful gibberish to me.
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  ksec
  I remember ( I may be very wrong ) eventually RSS and Atom became one and the same thing for consumer and that all RSS reader would parse Atom feed, RSS became the logo and the name people know, atom was used behind the scene.Apart from iTunes, as the article said.It has been 20+ years I do hope someone on HN can now spills the beans as to why.
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  vivzkestrel
  - since we are on the topic i got a question for you- what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres- will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it?- what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres?- how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed and a few new items added in the best case scenario. how do you diff this for storing?
• leephillips
  The article is correct. Anyone who knows what they’re doing builds an Atom feed, not RSS. In fact, I thought this was common knowledge a decade ago.
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  superkuh
  Atom is better than RSS in the way Betamax was better than VHS. With the same outcome and consequences for practical use.
• Vinnl
  tl;drAtom can do < or & in titles, and offer both a summary and the full text.Some podcast apps (Apple Podcasts) don't support Atom, so then plain RSS is better.So it doesn't really matter that much.