Genii Weblog

So, what is the value of an Atom feed?

Mon 5 Apr 2004, 03:00 PM



by Ben Langhinrichs
I have just started publishing this blog in Atom format (at atom.xml for those who care).  I have no idea what the value is, but I am irritated by the number of searches for atom.xml, so I thought I might as well give whoever they are what they were looking for.

Anybody know the inherent value?  It doesn't look like a lok of Domino bloggers have hopped on that bandwagon, but maybe they have and I just didn't notice.

Copyright © 2004 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:


139.1. Colin Pretorius
(04/06/2004 03:20 AM)

My uneducated take is that while many pundits have punted Atom, your average blogger doesn't really care what format it is, as long as it works. One place where standardisation (on Atom or anything else) probably is a good thing is in autodiscovery, which I guess is where your searches were coming from?


139.2. David Bockes
(04/06/2004 05:42 AM)

In my opinion, right now, the need to go to ATOM is more about geek chic than anything. The potential for it is pretty cool though. It really has to do with creating a semantic web and the ATOM standard is much better suited for that than current RSS versions. Although, there has been talk about merging the two, so probably sooner or later we'll be going to some form of ATOM/RSS anyway. In the end, this may all be a pipe dream. They could make a great standard for this that allows all kinds of whiz bang information to be passed around and it won't much matter. My experience has been that this stuff gets poorly and inconsistently implemented.


139.3. Ben Poole
(04/06/2004 05:53 AM)

I'm on RSS v0.92. It serves its purpose, and I see no reason for me to change.

Atom isn't a finished job yet, so I'm in "wait and see" mode.

To be honest, with regards following its development, I tuned out once all these intelligent, -- but at the same time incredibly *dense* -- people started having raging flamewars over the damn thing!