Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #90

inigyou wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Post by alehlopeh » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #26

If you publish content, Atom is the superior format. All the parsers support it so there's no argument there against using it. You use it, everything should work just fine. There are no real downsides. The issue with RSS of course is that there is a lot of really crappy and ancient code out there that should have died a long time ago written in languages like PHP, Ruby, etc. by people who did not really care about de…

Post by paulddraper » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #47

tjansen wrote: post #31

I agree that Atom is easier to use and better defined in some ways. But why on earth would you want to put unrestricted HTML in the title in the first place? How is a reader supposed to handle that? It's just a weird thing to allow. In practice, the differences between the syndication formats don't really matter. Today even less than when they were created, as a solution for most of the differences is just a prompt a…

Consider the title of my article: “Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter ”. That emphasis belongs there, and it’s mildly bad to lose it. (For presentation on my own site, I also control the line break position on larger screens; but that wouldn’t be appropriate for feeds, where you can’t control the presentation.) We accept that sentences can have formatting, and headings can have formatting, so why shouldn’t…

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #94

inigyou wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the DOM tree is going to say either html:code or {http://something}code neither of which is just code.

When an XML document contains HTML, the DOM representation is of elements in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. When you parse a document or fragment that is in HTML syntax, the DOM representation is of elements in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. There is no difference.

Post by superkuh » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 12:58 AM UTC

stymaar wrote: post #78

verisimi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responding to the generic comment that: > pretty much no-one uses either of them

And I stand with that phrase. I'm pretty sure that are more VHS users than RSS these days. It's not strictly zero, but it's a negligible fraction of internet users.