RSS vs. Atom
by Jonathan Quince
Thursday, February 12, 2004 05:32:44
We now suspend our sex-only editorial policy for an early-morning geek-out.
From the world of blogs I skim feeds off of because I don’t live in a political echo chamber (smirk), Dave Winer hits the nail on the head in regards to RSS vs. Atom.
As a webmaster running a blog, I have neither the time nor the inclination to read each spec in detail and decide which is superior on its technical merits. I just want something that will make it convenient for my busy readers to keep up with my site without having to refresh the Web page 20 times a day. I want easy, feature-rich syndication that works “out of the box” with a wide variety of software. (And — oh yeah — I want something that will support CDATA-encoded HTML in the author link (cough, cough). But that’s another issue altogether.)
As a user, I want something that will allow me to keep track of my favorite sites without having to refresh their Web pages 20 times a day. (Sound familiar?) Right now, I use SharpReader because it’s free and it works. I do not give a flying fuck about religious wars or dick-waving contests over whose format is better. I am perturbed when I drop an XML feed of some-sort-or-another into SharpReader and it doesn’t “just work”; I am particularly put out when that feed is put out automagically by Blogger, a service run by Google.
I daresay that most Blogger users and Blog*Spot publishers are busy people with lives and careers and relationships outside the sordid world of syndication format wars. If I am not utterly mistaken, publishing tools like Blogger and free fora like Blog*Spot are supposed to make personal publishing quick and easy for users — including ordinary, non-technically-inclined users who don’t even know (or care!) what RSS and Atom are. Like me, they want everything to just work. Isn’t that what the dream of broad-based personal publishing is all about?
Let’s put things in perspective here. In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter whether RSS is better or Atom is better. What matters is for easy personal publishing to become a reality. Now, if I’m trying to read the Blog*Spot rants of, say, a 20-something-ish healthcare worker, I can’t just e-mail her and bitch that her blog doesn’t have a feed that works in SharpReader, now can I? She’ll just give me a blank stare and patiently ask me if I’ve had my meds today.
Google, you are breaking perfectly good software that I use every day. For all I know and care, Atom may well be the best thing since sliced Jesus; if it is, please feel free to offer it as an alternative to RSS. If it’s really superior, I will eventually see the light and switch from the RSS feed to the Atom feed, right? But no, you’re trying to force me to dump software I already have installed on my desktop and switch to goodness-knows-what. This is the kind of arrogance that gets companies in trouble. Your search is starting to suck, and now you are deliberately making it hard for me to keep track of my favorite daily reads. Just like Netscape, you could go from being the darling to the laughingstock of the Internet. Don’t go that road.
Now, this is the perspective of someone whose primary use of RSS is on my desktop. There are plenty other uses for feeds, but the same thinking applies there, too (unless Atom is undeniably superior for one purpose in particular).
Ok, rant over. We now return to our regularly scheduled salacity.
[Update: I’m not sure I was clear enough about this. I’d love to see the perfect format; I worship perfection. But I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. And RSS seems good to me.]