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Introduction to Atom

validator.w3.org

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Re: Introduction to Atom

#61

Post by erk__ »

kmfrk wrote: post #45
erk__ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube still does I don't think they are linked to anywhere but the url is http://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

GitHub too for their releases; you just add /atom to get the feed, which works great.

GitHub have some quite nice feeds

If you want all the commits from a repo you can do something like: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/main/.atom

And if you now only is interested in the num module you can do: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/main/library/std/s...

Re: Introduction to Atom

#62

Post by eduction »

As a digital pedant I am very sympathetic to what prompted the creation of Atom. RSS2 for example under-specifies item "description" and "title," in particular how to put HTML in there, and using the most once-most-common technique (entity escaping HTML) makes it tricky to reliably do more basic things (encode/decode left angle brackets and ampersands, because now you don't know whether to do so singly or doubly).

But the undeniable victory of RSS shows the importance of being first and "easy" (even when "easy" means sweeping edge case problems under the rug). And of humans: Major publishers like the New York Times had adopted RSS and saw no need to switch to Atom because it was good enough. I'd argue the (also underspecified) CSV format is another example of this phenomenon.

(As for the entity escaping dilemma, people mostly just moved to using CDATA for their feed-embeded HTML, although I imagine people who write RSS readers still need to come up with semantics for figuring out if a title or description payload contains encoded html or not.)

Re: Introduction to Atom

#63

Post by gsnedders »

brabel wrote: post #26
eterevsky wrote: post #22

It was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.

IIRC RSS 2.0 included most of what Atom has, no?

RSS 2.0 is kinda an unspecified mess, and at least 15 year ago, if you wanted to be compatible with the majority of content you needed some weird heuristics to detect which interpretation of the spec a given feed was using (lol).

And Dave Winer was strongly against ever clarifying the spec, and that’s part of what led to Atom.

Re: Introduction to Atom

#64

Post by kevincox »

erk__ wrote: post #30
riffraff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this the hyperscalers fault? YouTube had atom feeds and I don't think Amazon and Microsoft have relevant syndication. Meta is surely responsible but that's it, imo.

YouTube still does I don't think they are linked to anywhere but the url is http://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

The channel pages still have auto-discovery links. So if you paste a channel URL into your feed reader it should find the feed easily.

Re: Introduction to Atom

#65

Post by kevincox »

eduction wrote: post #59
eloisant wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did catch on, pretty much everything that supported RSS also supported Atom. It's just that they both fell out of fashion when social media decided they prefer to keep their users captive than accepting interop.

I've never seen an Atom formatted podcast. NYTimes and WSJ each have a whole page devoted to their RSS feeds, I've never seen an Atom feed from either of them. It caught on sorta but didn't get the traction of what it was designed to replace. (Not saying this makes it Bad, btw.)

That's a good point. Podcasts are still (almost?) exclusively RSS 2.0. IDK if this is just momentum or Apple rules but I don't think I've ever seen an Atom podcast.

But many podcast clients actually still support Atom (probably using a feed library that supports various formats?) and basically all non-podcast feed readers support Atom.

Re: Introduction to Atom

#66

Post by kevincox »

j16sdiz wrote: post #55

TIL FeedBurner still exists: https://feedburner.google.com/

Kind of. It is now really just a caching proxy making it mostly useless.

Although I have found it occasionally useful for sites that have over-active bot-blocking on their feeds because Feedburner is often whitelisted.

Re: Introduction to Atom

#67

Post by abustamam »

thiht wrote: post #43
theshrike79 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XLM had DTDs and Schemas 20 years ago. JSON is still figuring it out.

If XML+DTD was so great, it would still be used.

I don't think that's a fair assessment. Plenty of great technologies died out for many reasons unrelated to its effectiveness.

Re: Introduction to Atom

#68

Post by abustamam »

theshrike79 wrote: post #46
abustamam wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Json has json schema. What are DTDs?

JSON Schema has existed for maybe 6 years in theory, in practice a few years. As for DTD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_definition Basically it tells the system what elements are allowed in which places and what attributes they can contain. Defines a html element that can contain a head and body, nothing else. Anything extra or missing will fail the validator. It was kinda-sorta eventually superseded by…

Ah interesting. Whenever I write an API I'll use Zod and whatever middlewares my framework needs to generate json schema for consumers, and whenever I consume an API I will use Zod to parse.

It would be nice if it were just built into the spec though!

Re: Introduction to Atom

#69

Post by abustamam »

deaddodo wrote: post #57
abustamam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that's interesting to know. Given that we have json schema now though, what reason would someone use XML over Json now?

JSON Schema is largely an answer to people seeking that type of built-in validation. As I'm not a huge proponent for either (a tool is a tool and you work with it in its ecosystem), I don't have personal feelings on it's adequacy. But, I would suspect, proponents of XML would still point to it's deeper typing system, document structure (especially the hierarchical features of it), and extremely mature ecosystem + too…

Gotcha! Thanks for the rundown. I started programming at the time when we were transitioning from XMLHTTPRequest to Fetch with json so I know of XML but basically only learned about json.

Re: Introduction to Atom

#70

Post by wonger_ »

tkcranny wrote: post #5

I’m not clear on the difference between atom and RSS. Atom seemed to be the better spec, but for my Astro blog I ended up sticking to the built in `rss` helper it ships with.

A decent technical comparison: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/

Mostly about Atom requiring IDs and timestamps, and having an overall cleaner and less ambiguous spec

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