
Why Atom was created - davewiner
http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/atom/WhyAtomWasCreated
======
blasdel
Atom exists because everything Dave Winer touches becomes a clusterfuck,
overwhelmed with problems both technical
(<http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss>) and social
([http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer_number)).
The rest of us needed a format free from his influence or control, one with
comprehensive specifications that he couldn't silently edit ('frozen' doesn't
apply to him).

Please stop producing any flavor of RSS. Absolutely stop producing the same
content in multiple formats, that's just inane. I am not not aware of any
software not written by and for Dave that cannot parse Atom (iTunes does
handle Atom podcast feeds, but they must be valid to work). If you really care
about ancient clients, run your Atom feeds through Feedburner, they can take
care of it for you:
[http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78971)

~~~
bl4k
1\. There are only really 4 versions of RSS, and Winer wrote two of them.
There were 3 different groups involved, which was the problem - the problem
isn't having newer versions.

2\. You could say the same of Mark Pilgrim's social problems. He is very
difficult to get along with, is very arrogant and lead a crusade against Winer
for years. He on one hand argued that RSS was fragmented and incompatible, but
his solution to that was to start yet another syndication format.

You are forgetting that what made syndication popular was the simplicity of
RSS. There were other formats before it, and there have been formats since -
but the ease of implementation and simplicity of RSS ushered in a whole new
era of services and nothing less than blogging itself, podcasting and all the
services since that have built on that foundation (ie. 'the social web').

~~~
blasdel
There may ideally be only 4 versions of RSS, but Winer was responsible for 6
of them :)

Mark may be an asshole, but he's nearly always correct (save for his recent
Apple II fixation), and he follows up instead of trying to edit his mistakes
from the record. He has a lot of company in hating Winer, basically everyone
Dave's ever worked on anything with.

Here's some examples of classic Dave: <http://www.metafilter.com/26701/>
<http://www.metafilter.com/33699/> <http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/>
(note that rcade, the author of the last link, was Dave's sole defender in the
earlier ones). Here's some freshly curated ridiculousness:
<http://eyeonwiner.org/> <http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/>

RSS is no simpler than Atom, not even when used naïvely — it's just easier to
break. It was successful because Winer was at one time successful, but after
he managed to attack and alienate everyone else in the field, they moved on
and started over with a clean slate.

~~~
bl4k
urgh.. I have no idea how this turned into me defending Winer since I only
wanted to respond to the Pilgrim posts which were FUD (the two examples you
originally posted).

You don't have to convince me that either of these guys are nutters - I know
it all too well.

My point is that there are two sides to this story (well, 4 really) - that RSS
popularized feeds and that in the past 10 years despite all the effort nothing
has been made easier for devs, if anything it is even more complicated (esp
with the namespace extensions from iTunes)

------
masklinn
ATTN: realize that the StackOverflow question dates back to 2008.

Also, iTunes has supported Atom feeds since iTunes 6 (October 2005) if not
earlier so the linked stackoverflow comment was wrong even as it was posted,
two years ago. If iTunes refuses to consume your Atom feed, it's likely
because your feed is broken and doesn't validate.

------
lutorm
Beginning to read that story, the only Atom I could think of was the
processor... which I quickly realized was not what they were talking about. It
seems this is a case of failing to see your post like your readers will,
without some preexisting context...

------
dochtman
So is the "davewiner" account here a sockpuppet? It wouldn't seem to make much
sense for the real Dave Winer to post this here.

~~~
davewiner
I posted it here because the author wanted to post it on my blog, and I didn't
want to host yet another of these angst-fests about who was right or wrong
about stuff that mostly never actually happened.

I once called Mark Pilgrim an asshole, that was the extent of my crime against
him. He had it coming, he was being an asshole. But if I had known it would
lead to the kind of jihad he led, I would have let it go.

Anyway, to answer your question -- yes this is me.

~~~
davewiner
Also, I'm going to stick with this account.

------
aberkowitz
I don't see why anybody should bother with Atom anymore. Are there any
applications that exclusively support Atom over RSS?

~~~
simonw
Ever tried to include an ampersand in an entry title in an RSS feed? The RSS
2.0 spec still doesn't specify if the title should be HTML encoded or not, and
the implementations tend to disagree as a result. This is why my apps always
produce Atom, never RSS.

Edit: Here's an article that illustrates the problem: [http://www.xn--
8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2006/06/encoding-rss-titl...](http://www.xn--
8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2006/06/encoding-rss-titles) \- this kind of unresolved
ambiguity in the RSS spec is one of the main reasons Atom was needed.

~~~
davewiner
XML tells you what to do there.

It says it very plainly in the RSS 2.0 spec.

"RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0
specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website."

Pretty sure the W3C tells you how to encode an ampersand in XML. If not, your
quarrel is with them, not RSS.

~~~
davewiner
Why did this get moderated down?

It's a serious point. The complaint isn't even a nitpick, it's covered. It's
like saying every program has to define arithmetic if it's going to add two
numbers together. No, it doesn't. That's the job of the processor.

~~~
blasdel
How do you still not understand this, 7 years later? The RSS specs you defined
do not allow the author to specify the type of text contained within an
element — the processor has to guess whether it was plain text or HTML based
on how many levels of escaping were applied.

~~~
davewiner
So you can happily use Atom, which allows you to say whether your title has
markup or not.

What alternative was there? Would you have been happy with just adding an
attribute to title? What if people didn't use it? What would you have solved
then?

And would you have been happy with jsut that one change? THen why is Atom so
different from RSS? Why did the name for <item> change to <entry>? I don't
recall anyone offering a reason why item was such a bad name.

Another question -- when was the last time you saw a title that had markup in
it? I've never seen one, and my code has parsed a lot of feeds over a lot of
years. Perhaps people followed the doctor's advice. If it hurts when you do
it, don't do it.

Try a thought experiment, suppose we had changed the spec. What else would you
have wanted to change? Juding from the Atom spec, quite a bit. How many RSS's
would we have then?

And who would this have been good for? We all would have had to stop making
RSS apps and convene and working group and hash it all out. So instead of
having 50 people on the Atom mail list, we would have had 800 people on the
"Let's Completely Redesign RSS" mail list.

Did you observe what happened with SOAP when the WG was formed? And you think
that would have been worth it, just to get an attribute on the title element?

You have to look at the actual problems people are having writing apps.

That you guys could only find this and the number-of-enclosures issue says
that RSS 2.0 is pretty damned good. And it works for what it was designed to
do. And things we didn't expect when it was developed. That's the sign of
"pretty good" technology. No it's not perfect. Anything you ship will not be.
Atom is not perfect either.

It's amazing to me that after 7 years, and the lack of impact that Atom has
had, that you still don't get this. I would never have said it this way in
normal discourse, but I think you should have the experience of someone
lecturing you in public, as you have lectured me.

~~~
Isofarro
Yes, you were (in hindsight) right in standing fast against correcting these
problems in RSS 2.0, no-one would have been satisfied with the result.

Atom started around the discussion of "An Anatomy of a Well Formed Blog
Entry", not any specification text. We didn't start with a copy of RSS 2.0 and
XML/RPC and rewrite bits and pieces until it became Atom. The Atom community
went further back than that, we examined how RSS was being used at that time,
and considered how it might be used in the future, and defined several use
cases or problem statements, and built up a specification format based on
that. As far as I remember, we never started with the RSS 2.0 spec text.

The Atom Syndication fomat (the XML part) and the Atom Publishing format (the
REST part) started as one and then later ran separately in parallel. Both fed
requirements into each other.

In RSS2.0 the item element was always inside a channel, so there was always a
parent context of it's meaning beyond it's namespaced definition. With Atom
publishing format, we have blog entries as stand alone documents outside of a
feed (so they can be created, retrieved, and updated as a single document). In
that context, a top-level element name of entry is an improvement over item.
And it was important to us to use the same vocabulary across both the
syndication and publishing formats so the element became entry on both.

Atom started from a clean slate, as you point out, there was going to be no
way of fixing those problems with the RSS2.0 specification without
significantly breaking existing implementations and backwards compatibility,
and if somehow these were avoided, the RSS2.0 specification would probably
have ended up in an absolute mess.

~~~
davewiner
So there's an inconsistency betw your post and this comment.

Maybe you'd like to review your post and see which parts you really believe
and which parts are just hyperbole.

Seems like a good time to figure out what actually happened there, as opposed
to just re-reciting the same tired myths yet again.

That's what I liked about the comment on Stack Overflow. He learned something
from the way things turned out. This comment also shows that you've learned
something, but your post is the same old same old.

