Comments on: Feed Confusion

By: Milind Alvares

Milind Alvares — Mon, 09 May 2005 19:18:07 +0000

I had no idea there was such a debate on the different feeds. I always thought RSS 2.0 was better than 1.0 and so forth and Atom was something unknown to me. I just use whatever blogger puts for me and use firefox live bookmarks which work well for me…

By: Dan Cederholm

Dan Cederholm — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 06:46:27 +0000

Nick - Thanks for the 301 permanent redirect tip. I've just simplified things, tossing out my Atom versions, pointing now to the RSS 2.0 ones. Feels good to just offer one format, where as you say, any decent aggregator will support.

By: Nick Bradbury

Nick Bradbury — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 01:01:38 +0000

As others have suggested, there’s little need for having more than one type of feed. Pretty much every aggregator these days supports all flavors of RSS/Atom, so just pick one and stick with it. Otherwise, you risk confusing your visitors with arcane geek stuff they don’t need to care about.
If later on you find that a different format offers something you need, switch to it and permanently redirect (HTTP 301) the old feed to the new one. Most aggregators will automatically update a feed’s stored URL when a permanent redirect is encountered.

By: Michael Romero

Michael Romero — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 19:12:54 +0000

You’ll always have proponents and oponents of both styles of feed. Admittedly, ATOM is the better defined of the two, but RSS is kind of a defacto standard of the internets these days. It just is one of those developments of the web age.

By: Adrian D.

Adrian D. — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:07:16 +0000

Erin —
To extend your analogy further, I think it’s a bit like saving a graphic as a GIF of PNG. Could you imagine if we had to save our graphics in both formats to accomodate all users/browsers?
Now that feedreaders support both formats, I think it’s time we provided feeds in a single format only.
Bah, just thinking about it further… it’s not that unusual for us to provide multiple formats for other media types… documents (doc/pdf), video (wmv/qt/real) etc :(

By: Steven

Steven — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 15:07:08 +0000

My preference is RDF, and thus RSS 1.0, my main reason is pretty pathetic, but I like the whole semantic web idea, at least in parts :)
But in general I’ve no issues with whatever people want to publish there feeds in, if there all valid XML formats it’s not too dificult to change from one to another without loosing too much information.

By: Erin

Erin — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 20:52:34 +0000

For some odd reason, I think the Atom vs. RSS debate is eerily similar to discussion from about 8-10 years back: Design for Netscape or IE?

By: yafujifide

yafujifide — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 05:01:31 +0000

I have only one feed, and it’s an Atom feed. I like to keep it simple.

By: Jough Dempsey

Jough Dempsey — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 00:46:59 +0000

I’m offering three different versions of my news feed now: RSS 2.0, RSS/RDF 1.0, and Atom. They’re all generated by a PHP script via entries in a database.
If a new format became popular tomorrow I could easily add a new feed type using the same data.
As far as templatizing the feeds, I found RSS 2.0 to be the easiest to code, followed by Atom. RSS 1.0? It’s a beast for hand-coders. It’s not obvious what each part means when you’re reading the raw XML file, which is what people without a feed reader will see if they click on the link to your feeds. For most web sites, this means that most people will see your feeds as raw XML first.
I know you can specify a style sheet to display the feeds and make them look prettier, but this seems antithetical to the idea of syndication feeds to me.
Of course, I’m a publisher who doesn’t use feeds myself. I offer them because some visitors asked for them. I prefer to read web pages and look at designs. And I don’t offer full text *anything* in feeds because I want traffic to come to my web site.
I’m less interested in the multiple formats of feeds as I am the purpose and content of them. What *should* be in a feed to make it most useful? Why does a web site need a feed at all?

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 00:16:08 +0000

Randy, whilst you're right, you make a slightly disingenuous statement. Interested people (i.e. geeks) should read the reasons for removing the version attribute (which includes backwards compatibility for future versions).