The Sun BabelFish Blog
Don't panic !
Atom 1.0 is an IETF standard
The Atom Syndication format is now a proposed IETF standard, which means that it is a first class IETF citizen. An html version as well as links to the developing Atom protocol are available on the atompub.org web site.
I am really happy to be listed among the contributors, and I think Atom is a great improvement over RSS2.0. I am not yet sure how much of an improvement it is over RSS1.0, as I don't know the RSS1.0 standard in enough detail to be able to comment. The main advantage that RSS1.0 still has over Atom is that, being built on RDF, it has a very clear and solid extensibility framework. (That RSS1.0 needed some improvement is in part visible by the fact that an RSS1.1 draft spec has been delivered recently) Atom could have become clearly and unequivocally a better standard than RSS1.0 had it been possible to tweak it just a little bit to make it RDF compatible. The case for the extensibility advantages of RDF were very clearly made by Dan Brickley in an email to the atom mailing list a year ago, on the 18 August 2004. But as the rest of the thread shows some people found it very difficult to understand this point. There is clearly a lot of learning by experience the hard way that is going to take place before Dan's points are well understood and assimilated.
What Atom has now clearly achieved though is to add clarity to every other aspect of syndication. Work on the RDF side of things is continuing on on the atom-owl mailing list which will hopefully help provide a standard ontology for the atom format.
And by the way, BlogEd (when publishing to a simple web server using ftp such as my personal blog), now publishes an Atom 1.0 feed.
Posted at 07:00PM Aug 18, 2005 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in BlogEd | Comments[0]
Note on comments:
- I know the forms below are a little small. We have asked for years for this to be changed, but I don't think it's going to happen soon. In Apple's Safari you can resize the entry box with you mouse. For people using other browsers click on this javascript link, that should allow you to resize your form.
- Comments are moderated, so they will take a little time to appear. Currently moderation means I have to read them personally. Hopefully with OpenId deployment, this will become more automated.
- HTML markup no longer works here, due to some decision made somewhere. Sorry about that.
- If you are having trouble posting, it may be that you need javascript to be enabled. I don't think javascript should be needed for submitting a form, but that's the way it is here.
- Check your comments by using the preview button...
