Providing Rss and Atom feeds? Do we need both or has RSS won?

Question

Hi folks,

I want to provide some RSS feed(s) for my site. Is it worth providing Atom feeds? or is atom the more common feed? Is there a winner?

BTW, this relates to programming because I'm required to program the feed which we will provide (or use some open source code, etc).

cheers.

Update

So far it looks like peeps are saying Atom should be the way to go if i need to only spend time supporting one? Anyone else agree with these thoughts (and hopefully backed up by some stats??)

Possible Solution

While stumbling around the net for some Rss schema details, I was reading the RSS Wiki entry, and they say

As of January 2007[update], tracking data from www.syndic8.com indicates that the three main versions of RSS in current use are 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0. Of these, RSS 0.91 accounts for 13 percent of worldwide RSS usage and RSS 2.0 for 67 percent, while RSS 1.0 has a 17 percent share.[22] These figures, however, do not include usage of the rival web feed format Atom. As of August 2008[update], the syndic8.com website is indexing 546,069 total feeds, of which 86,496 were some dialect of Atom and 438,102 were some dialect of RSS.[23]

This suggests that RSS is the dominat format over Atom.

So I might have answered the question myself.

Answer 1

I wouldn't say either has or will win. Most readers support both, so there's no real push for one to take over the other.

But, offering both is probably just a waste of effort. Just pick one, whichever you prefer -- from your comments, I'm guessing RSS.

Answer 2

There are a few differences there which could be summed up :

• In Atom, the content can be specified (text, html) and can even be a binary (say, an audio track or a video) in base64 encoded form.
• Using the quite standard used XML date format (rfc3339).
• Handles content in different languages.
• Modularity

Also, the Atom file format is part of a greater scheme with is Atom Publication Protocol, which can be used not only to read but also to write.

Answer 3

RSS is a bit of a mess (see this older article for a view of how bad it was six years ago, and realize it hasn't gotten any better in that time -- seven different mutually incompatible versions!), so if you've got a choice and only want to deal with one, you should really go with Atom...