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rippeltippel
eloisant
To be fair, Atom the XML Feed, similar to RSS (linked here) is probably the oldest one. It's from 2005.
Now why a spec from 2005 is in the front page of hacker news, I have no idea...
echelon
This one is (was) pretty important.
The hyperscalers stopped that timeline from winning, though.
riffraff
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.
erk__
YouTube still does
<feed xmlns:yt="http://www.youtube.com/xml/schemas/2015" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
echelon
Google on several occasions took moves to make the web less semantic.
They dumped microformats and standards in favor of soupy error tolerant formats that benefitted their search engine and made it harder for other efforts to make information shareable and accessible.
They wanted it to be easy to get information in, but for you to have to go through them to get information out.
mplanchard
I hand-rolled an atom feed for my statically generated blog. It’s a reasonable, easy format to work with.
eterevsky
It was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.
ravenstine
I thought it did in fact catch on but most people still referred to it as "RSS".
eloisant
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.
eduction
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.)
kevincox
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.
riffraff
I think it caught on well enough, platforms such as Wordpress still support it out of the box (I just checked my blog, it works).
I liked Atom's clean design but it felt it was mostly pushed by Google (I may be misremembering) and in the end the syndicated web faded into obscurity anyway.
johnny_reilly
Docusaurus supports it out of the box as well https://docusaurus.io/blog/atom.xml
brabel
IIRC RSS 2.0 included most of what Atom has, no?
gsnedders
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.
talideon
Not really, and it's still more error-prone than Atom.
There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.
echelon
IIRC, Aaron Swartz was one of the contributors to the format. RIP.
el_io
I remember him being contributor to the RSS format, why would he also contribute another similar format?
intrasight
First iteration of Google's APIs were atom. I do miss XML.
abustamam
One of the API providers I use at work returns responses in XML and we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect.
What do you like about XML? I feel like I'm missing something.
deaddodo
The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation.
Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
dolmen
JSON is structured (not plain text to be analyzed by an IA). JSON has JSON Schema.
In addition, JSON is easier to parse and to map to common data structures of programming languages.
abustamam
Thanks, that's interesting to know. Given that we have json schema now though, what reason would someone use XML over Json now?
theshrike79
XLM had DTDs and Schemas 20 years ago.
JSON is still figuring it out.
thiht
If XML+DTD was so great, it would still be used.
abustamam
Json has json schema. What are DTDs?
refulgentis
I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
abustamam
> useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase
Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for?
> I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON?
I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.
drob518
Well, that’s a blast from the past.
j16sdiz
TIL FeedBurner still exists: https://feedburner.google.com/
kevincox
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.
tkcranny
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.
JimDabell
In the beginning was RSS 0.x. It was originally intended to be based on RDF. Compromises were made and it ended up dropping the RDF. The spec. wasn’t very good and had several ambiguities.
Some people forged ahead with a cleaned up RDF-based version and called it RSS 1.0, while other people went ahead with the ambiguities but without RDF and called it RSS 2.0. The person publishing RSS 2.0 considered it finished and refused to update it. There was drama.
A bunch of people decided that there was too much to clean up from within that mess and started a new format, Atom. This ended up being a much better spec. with an official RFC, but at this point everybody was calling any type of feed “RSS”, even if it was Atom.
If you have the choice, you should pick Atom.
wonger_
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
kinow
I also didn't know much of the difference between the two, and I also used RSS for my Hugo site.
At the bottom of the article there's, under "See Also", a link to this page comparing RSS and Atom: https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared...
It seems like the last update is from 2008, but the section on the differences has a few interesting items. I am not sure if it changed, but it says:
"The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made (although the specification is under a Creative Commons licence) and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work."
The Wikipedia RSS page has also a small section comparing RSS and Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom
"Technically, Atom has several advantages: less restrictive licensing, IANA-registered MIME type, XML namespace, URI support, RELAX NG support.[35]"
gabazing
Same here. Astro has @astrojs/rss package but not atom. It should be an atom option in the same package or needed an @astrojs/atom package.
There is an npm package called astrojs-atom but i am not use it is official or safe.
Is there any astro core developer reading this, please add atom option addition to rss.
perrohunter
what is old is new again?
hnlmorg
No, this is just old.
Pity though. RSS / Atom was a fantastic concept and it’s a real pity big tech killed them off.
rambambram
Nothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.
geodel
Agreed. That nowadays people or even big companies find it outside their core competency to host their blog, have atom/RSS feeds is not because big tech killing it.
darreninthenet
How do you curate and keep on top of so many feeds? I have ~10 on my RSS reader and I sometimes have trouble keeping up if I have a couple of busy days
holistio
Is there any platform for sharing what feeds we follow? Would love to discover some new blogs.
ushimitsudoki
[dead]
pletnes
Lots of sites publish outages, incidents, downtime over RSS/atom. Works great for monitoring, post them into slack with a bot and you can start a discussion thread about that incident where you first hear about it.
bawolff
Meh. Big tech didnt kill it off, it was already dead at that point. Sometimes things just arent popular no matter how much we might want it to be.
lolive
Google Reader was uber popular at a time, then Google decided that syndication of articles, with comments, had to be an exclusive feature of their Facebook-esque Google+.
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.)
bossyTeacher
So many words to choose and they had to choose one that already has been used before. Why are techies so devoid of imagination?
eloisant
What software used "Atom" before 2005?
jasonlotito
It's from more than 2 decades ago.
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At this point, developers have named so many projects "Atom" that there are officially more Atoms in the world than there are atoms in the universe.