Should developers prefer Atom over RSS?

Jump to Comments

Earlier today I read a post from Dewitt Clinton (via Niall), lead engineer for Amazon’s A9. In his post, he is recommending to developers that they prefer Atom over RSS for applications that support syndication. The reason, in essence, is that Atom is more expressive and supports more scenarios in a technically superior way for developers.

Dewitt writes, “While I don’t want to get embroiled in a format war, I will say that I’ve found the Atom 1.0 standard to meet the needs of nearly every single problem that I’ve thrown at it. Amazingly so, actually. I’ve been consistently impressed with how well the authors of the Atom syndication format anticipated the needs of the advanced content syndication community. There has yet to be a use-case that I’ve explored — and I work with some thorny ones — in which Atom has let me down.”

While I’ve never written code for RSS or Atom feed generation, validation or consumption I do understand the issues behind Dewitt’s post and do recall the original intent behind the Atom effort (which I supported) to make the format and supporting APIs much more functional for developers. Fast forward a few years though, and now I’m wondering if it is really worth it. Will developers care enough to begin focusing their designs around Atom with RSS support as a secondary focus?

Scoble weighs in on the topic as well and states, “Users don’t care about specs, or arguments about formats. When you understand that you’ll understand how RSS got so big in the first place.” Scoble points out that an application that clearly demonstrates the benefits of Atom over RSS is what is needed to convince people. The problem is that in Dewitt’s case, the users are the developers and the average end-user won’t likely understand or care about the issues. But does that mean they are unimportant? Certainly not…

In the end, I think we should prefer formats that are readily supported and easily understood by the largest number of users. For some specific cases, maybe developers should prefer Atom. In some cases, maybe RSS is much simpler and straightforward. In all cases though, I don’t think that the users will know or care which format is there as long as things work well. And most importantly, let’s avoid another battle in the format wars.

UPDATE- Dewitt has responded to Robert’s post and writes, “RSS really is good enough for the bulk of the blogging community. And it is hell of a lot better than what we had before.” He also agrees with Robert that we should show the value to end users. I’m still not sure what those scenarios would look like, but I guess if they exist it can’t be a bad idea.

0 Comments

Filed under Blogging, Web