Obama's White House Adopts Atom Format

I became the first subscriber on Bloglines to the feed for the new White House web site, which launched at 12:00 p.m. as Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States. As a syndication dork, I was interested to discover that the feed employs Atom as its format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title>White House.gov Blog Feed</title>
  <link href="http://www.whitehouse.gov" />
  <updated>2009-01-20T12:05:25Z</updated>
  <author><name>EOP</name></author>
  <id>urn:uuid:ca4baafc-b6bc-45e5-9144-79c5289d9518</id>
  <entry>
    <title>A National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation</title>
    <link href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/a_national_day_of_renewal_and_reconciliation/" />
    <id>urn:uuid:ca4baafc-b6bc-45e5-9144-79c5289d9518</id>
    <updated>2009-01-20T17:01:00Z</updated>
    <summary>President Barack Obama's first proclamation.</summary>
  </entry>
</feed>

The Atom feed passes the Feed Validator, but there are four issues that trigger warning messages:

Your feed appears to be encoded as "utf-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII" [help]
Missing atom:link with rel="self" [help]
Two entries with the same id: urn:uuid:ca4baafc-b6bc-45e5-9144-79c5289d9518 (4 occurrences) [help]
Two entries with the same value for atom:updated: 2009-01-20T17:01:00Z [help]

When he has the time, President Obama can address these issues pretty quickly.

First, the XML element should reflect the actual encoding transmitted by the White House server:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>

Alternatively, the feed should be published using the UTF-8 encoding.

Next, the feed's link element must include an rel="self" attribute indicating that it's the feed's own URL:

Finally, steps should be taken so that each feed entry has a unique ID. I recommend using the tag URI format, which for the White House could produce id elements like this:

<id>tag:whitehouse.gov,2009:1</id>

The final number in the id element should be a unique number, such as the index number of a blog entry.

The new White House site promises more feeds to come, but describes them as RSS feeds:

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It is an XML-based method for distributing the latest news and information from a website that can be easily read by a variety of news readers or aggregators.

Either this is an error -- Atom feeds are not in RSS format, of course -- or Obama's effort towards national reconciliation includes the combatants in the RSS/Atom war.

Atom · Rss · Programming · 2009/01/20 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

I also noticed the incorrect timestamps! Also, sorry for the spam, but since you're a syndication dork, maybe you'd be interested in an RSS notifier I've just created: http://www.michaelfogleman.com/feed-notifier/ I'd certainly be interested in any feedback you have.

#1 · Michael · 2009/01/20

If you look *real* closely there is an XML byte-order mark at the beginning of the file and a curly apostrophe in "Honoring Dr. King's Legacy". (To be fair, the latter wasn't there when you originally found this feed).

This means that the feed isn't ASCII, it is utf-8. It also means that the White House doesn't support RFC 3023.

The only reason I knew to look is that the feed validator won't complain on the encoding if it is true that the feed would parse correctly with either encoding.

#2 · Sam Ruby · 2009/01/20

Obama's effort towards national reconciliation includes the combatants in the RSS/Atom war.

He should warm up on Israel/Palestine and before moving onto the really intractable problems.

#3 · Ray · 2009/01/21

Why not just use RSS?

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