Which is best? I always produce ATOM feeds, as they seem more comprehensive, but I'm not sure which is technically better.
+3
A:
Some food for thought here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12509/why-are-people-still-creating-rss-feeds
John Topley
2008-09-29 20:50:21
+6
A:
ATOM essentially supercedes RSS. RSS has many versions, and it gets a bit confusing. RSS also has poor support for well-defined built-in datatypes, such as timestamps, so parsing routines have to handle many different possibilities.
ATOM tightens up these holes.
On the other hand, RSS has much better support from client software, especially the older stuff, so if you want to get the maximum distribution for your syndicated content, RSS is probably preferable.
skaffman
2008-09-29 20:50:43
Is your last point really true? All the major feed readers have supported both for quite a while as far as I can tell.
John Topley
2008-09-29 20:52:13
It gets less true with every passing day, but if all you're distributing is human-readable news and what not, then RSS is "good enough", will likely have better coverage. But it's minimal. If you need machine-digestable content, though, then ATOM is much, much better.
skaffman
2008-09-29 20:55:20
If all the major readers support both then you would have to look at the long tail. Since a lrrge portion of the long tail would be older readers that have not had proper support and upgrades I would say that rss does technically have greater coverage. You have to ask yourself if you care or not.
EBGreen
2008-09-29 20:56:43
I serve Atom exclusively and nobody complained. Can you name any significant software that supports RSS but not Atom?
porneL
2008-11-27 13:19:44
+7
A:
The Atom wiki has a page comparing RSS 2.0 and Atom.
Perhaps the biggest reason to choose Atom over RSS is this:
RSS 2.0 may contain either plain text or escaped HTML, with no way to indicate which of the two is provided. Escaped HTML is ugly (for example, the string "AT&T" would be expressed as "AT&T") and has been a source of difficulty for implementors. The content model for titles is underspecified; titles containing angle brackets or ampersands will be misinterpreted by a significant fraction of readers regardless of how they are represented. The RSS 2.0 content model does not permit actual well-formed XML markup, which reduces the re-usability of content.
Atom has a carefully-designed payload container. Content must be explicitly labeled as one of:
- plain text, with no markup (the default)
- escaped HTML, as commonly used with RSS 2.0
- well-formed XHTML markup
- some other XML vocabulary
- base64-encoded binary content
- a pointer to Web content not included in the feed
cjm
2008-09-29 21:00:18