Recently I had a question posted:

Comment by kevinthespears.com
Do you know what the differences between atom and rss 2 are? I did a couple of quick searches but only really found a couple of sites saying that basically Google is the only thing keeping atom going. I couldn’t find anything to show why one was better than the other.

Yeah ATOM is much more robust. It has many more options within the schema that RSS just wasn’t meant for. RSS is more popular for sure. msn.com will allow you to subscribe via RSS to their news sections by topic, CNET is starting and WIRED.com has for a while. ATOM – well it is used by me and gmail.com. That is it I think.

Well also ATOM is harder to implement. It is a much more strict structure. Although I provide an ATOM feed on my blog, it isn’t really ATOM validated. Dates are in the wrong format, I put some HTML <gasp> not XHTML in my postings, and things like that.

I am not sure if ATOM or RSS will become the norm. I am betting RSS is what I am going to use the most of. The thing about the subject is aggregators are going to need to support both. At least they will need to support RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3. If they don’t then you will run the risk of not being able to see your favorite feed in one place.

I personally like to read my feeds in a web browser in a format like http://blogs.msdn.com. But most aggregators don’t allow that sort of formatting – so I am left to write my own or try more.

So what are the real differences? You need to look at the specs for each format. They are just different in structure. They are both XML, but there is where the similarities end.

RSS specification: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
ATOM specification: http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php

But you know how I did it? I looked at other implementations and took note how it was formatted there. It is all XML, so there are rules to follow and they are usually easy enough.

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