Atom and RSS Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Bananas

When Randy Charles Morin and I were trying to wrap up the RSS Autodiscovery specification, we removed references to Atom to avoid discord. Telling Atom publishers how to implement autodiscovery while they're working on their own spec seemed like a good way to spark a war between syndication formats worse than "Dick York vs. Dick Sargent" or "let the rabbit eat Trix."

Naturally, our decision angered Atom developers.

Sam Ruby:

Push the reset button, and get a better attitude.

I thought I had the right attitude. Even though I am the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, I love Atom so much I should marry it. They've done good work and I want the board to support it in any area where there's common ground. A unified autodiscovery specification for Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 is the best possible outcome.

I contributed three proposals this morning to the Atom autodiscovery specification currently under draft:

Every page of the RSS board's web site includes a link to Atom and RSS 1.0. The same isn't true in reverse -- we're not getting link love from them yet -- but I felt like it was important to declare peace between our dialects.

As far as I'm concerned, the syndication wars are over and everybody won.

Atom · Rss · Xml · 2006/11/28 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

I'm not sure I'd say "angered"... "confused" yes, but not "angered". Now that you've explained I think it makes perfect sense and I definitely welcome cooperation between the RSS and Atom communities.

#1 · James Snell · 2006/11/28

It is clear now that I've been punk'd.

The board voted on one proposal, a recommendation was made off list and off the record to change it, Jame's repeated offers were ignored, a change was made and to the evident surprise of at least one board member, what we was told was that what he voted for and what was approved were two different things.

And, somehow, that's all my fault.

What frustrates me is that every opportunity has been made to provide the opportunity for us to discuss Atom as "our" spec, but in each time you manage to distance yourself and position yourself as an outsider.

All during all this time, I've received from you a steady stream of requests that I change a link here or there in products and pages that I have produced to favor this effort. Each time, I've complied.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to start undoing that work.

#2 · Sam Ruby · 2006/11/28

I'm on Atom-Syntax today making suggestions and posting proposals to the Atom wiki. That puts me right in the middle of things.

I didn't ignore James' request, but we had an active spec vote that had to be resolved first.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to start undoing that work.

That's exactly the opposite effect I'm hoping for. The board's work takes place in public, and dealing with things like new member Paul Querna's objection are part of our maturation process.

By now, I feel like we've demonstrated our good intentions and ought to have your support (and your links). What's accomplished by working less with the RSS Advisory Board? If we're making mistakes, wouldn't it be better to persuade the group to correct them?

The board's goal is to be a place where people can discuss and resolve issues of common concern in RSS 2.0 development. You can challenge our legitimacy to do that, but there's no one else attempting to fill that role -- Harvard's RSS 2.0 site is frozen and won't be updated again. How does the RSS board finish second in a one-man race?

#3 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2006/11/28

"As far as I'm concerned, the syndication wars are over and everybody won."

If so, where's the $100 million dollar "Atom Investors" venture capital fund?

The war may be over, but every war leaves devastation in its wake :-(.

#4 · Seth Finkelstein · 2006/11/29

Venture capitalists are chasing RSS dollars instead of Atom dollars for the same reason Microsoft calls its syndication support "RSS support" in Vista, even though it supports Atom too. All of the marketing buzz is in the magic letters "RSS."

I expect that we'll start seeing more buzz around Atom as the publishing protocol joins the syndication format as a finished work. Atom's better poised for future growth into new areas than RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0, and it doesn't have the three big unresolved questions hanging over it (single or multiple enclosures, HTML markup outside descriptions and what to do with relative URLs).

#5 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2006/11/29

Hi Rogers,

I think you should blog about trying Really Open Specification at

http://feedautodiscovery.org

#6 · Robert Sayre · 2006/11/29