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Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

chrismorgan.info

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Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#81

Post by talideon »

stymaar wrote: post #12
superkuh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atom is a response to not wanting to support backwards compatibility like RSS does in order to improve things. https://web.archive.org/web/20080216234454/http://www.sixapa... It's explicitly a different thing. This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer". It is effective to communicate with people who aren't interested in computers, but it's also not true and the distin…

> and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much. That may have been true 20 years ago, but now that pretty much no-one uses either of them , I'd be surprised if RSS was still meaningfully more widespread than Atom. (Except everything is being called RSS). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141336 is the only valid response to your VHS/Betamax compariso…

Well, the likes of Wordpress make this a bit of a mixed bag. It still publishes multiple feeds in multiple format, with what proports to being an RSS feed actually being a Frankenstein's monster of RSS, Atom, and random other namespaces.

I don't know why they persist in still doing that after all these years.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#82

Post by mcv »

chrismorgan wrote: post #52
tjansen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We accept that sentences can have formatting, and headings can have formatting, so why shouldn’t titles? 1. Because there are things you can obviously not put in a headline. Like a large image, a YouTube video, or a paragraph. Defining an HTML subset would make it somewhat usable. But letting each consumer of the Atom feed decide which subset they support will make such a title look bad on at least those renderers…

Here’s an example of in titles being quite valuable: https://chrismorgan.info/blog/make-and-git-diff-test-harness... . Inferior plain text: Using make and git diff for a simple and powerful test harness Better plain text: Using `make` and `git diff` for a simple and powerful test harness Better HTML: Using make and git diff for a simple and powerful test harness I use the second for the and og:title on my site, and t…

I would really strongly prefer titles to work the same way they do in html, which means plain text. Why should feed titles need a different standard than html titles?

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#83

Post by zaptheimpaler »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #73
paulryanrogers wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As text or XML column type. IME a document store or columnar backend is significantly cheaper if you're not querying it from SQL.

- there is definitely one dilemma here - if you split the rss document into its "items" i am not sure if you can store each item separately inside postgres using that XML data type - if you store the whole document, you end up with a problem when say the feed partially updates after a few minutes - one suggestion i hear from r/PostgreSQL is that you store the XML blob somewhere else like hstore or something and someh…

The data is probably small enough and infrequently updated such that almost anything will work. If you split the items then you would have a separate episodes table with one row per episode joined to the podcasts table. If you store the whole XML in a row then you can overwrite the row when the feed changes. Doing the parsing and splitting into episodes in DB sounds better to me because your clients will otherwise constantly be repeating that work.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#84

Post by leephillips »

rhdunn wrote: post #58
leephillips wrote: post #10

The article is correct. Anyone who knows what they’re doing builds an Atom feed, not RSS. In fact, I thought this was common knowledge a decade ago.

Unless they are building a podcast application which is predominantly RSS 2.0 based with some extensions from itunes and others to provide additional podcast-specific metadata such as episode and season information.

Yes, except for podcasts.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#86

Post by chrismorgan »

throw0101a wrote: post #67
Vinnl wrote: post #22

tl;dr Atom can do Some podcast apps (Apple Podcasts) don't support Atom, so then plain RSS is better. So it doesn't really matter that much.

> Some podcast apps (Apple Podcasts) don't support Atom, so then plain RSS is better. Apple Podcasts stopped supporting Atom (sadly) a few years ago: * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host... Not sure why they decided to do so (lack of volume/traffic?).

As far as I can ascertain, and as I described in the last section of this article, they never actually supported it meaningfully. I believe that the iTunes client got Atom support, but not the iTunes Music Store, and that was the part that actually mattered.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#87

Post by thaumasiotes »

benj111 wrote: post #32
thaumasiotes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Not at all. RSS is a product category. Many RSS feeds are, if you look into them, Atom. Your RSS reader just doesn't bother to tell you, because why would you care? Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.

To extend the metaphor though. An RSS reader that works with atom is the same as a VHS player that also has a beta max player. Or your blueray player that plays dvds and CDs....

> To extend the metaphor though. An RSS reader that works with atom is the same as a VHS player that also has a beta max player.

An RSS reader that works with atom is the same as a VCR that will play VHS and Betamax cassettes out of the same physical slot, in a world where videocassettes are sold with no indication of which format they've been printed in, and they're all the same shape, and there are no VCRs that can fail to play either format.

> Or your blueray player that plays dvds and CDs....

Which, yes, is a lot like this, but absolutely nothing like VHS vs Betamax.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#88

Post by thaumasiotes »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #33
thaumasiotes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Not at all. RSS is a product category. Many RSS feeds are, if you look into them, Atom. Your RSS reader just doesn't bother to tell you, because why would you care? Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.

huh, I call the atom feed on my site an atom feed. I wonder if that confuses people...

Yes, obviously it will.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#89

Post by thaumasiotes »

superkuh wrote: post #7
thaumasiotes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Not at all. RSS is a product category. Many RSS feeds are, if you look into them, Atom. Your RSS reader just doesn't bother to tell you, because why would you care? Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.

Atom is a response to not wanting to support backwards compatibility like RSS does in order to improve things. https://web.archive.org/web/20080216234454/http://www.sixapa... It's explicitly a different thing. This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer". It is effective to communicate with people who aren't interested in computers, but it's also not true and the distin…

> This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer".

Referring to an atom feed as an "RSS feed" is exactly equivalent to bringing Hydrox cookies to a potluck and hearing someone call them "Oreos".

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#90

Post by chrismorgan »

inigyou wrote: post #71
qznc wrote: post #38

Atom is correct to a degree that is annoying. It is XML, so not all HTML5 is allowed. You would have to convert your HTML5 to XHTML5. Possible but harder than string-concatenation. It requires full self links, so you must put your domain name in there as relative links would be an error. When using a static generator, why should I care where the files are published? My website has valid Atom feeds. Still, it's an ann…

And those three ways to encode a title. Do I really imagine that every parser is going to undo the double-encoding correctly? Or XHTML conversion if I use a namespace prefix?

… yes? It’s simple XML parsing, and then taking it as text, serialised HTML, or an already-parsed DOM tree. You are using an actual XML parser, right?

In most environments it’s no harder, and in browsers themselves (which is where half of it is consumed) it’s arguably easier.

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