Comments for Syndication Wars 2007: Atom's Time is Nigh, With Google on its Side

Syndication Wars 2007: Atom's Time is Nigh, With Google on its Side

2007-07-25T23:56:34Z

Tim Bray announced today on his blog that the Atom Publishing Protocol, a way to create and update Web resources, is "done". He wrote:

"Atom is done. Now the editorial processes grind away and eventually the official specification of the Atom Publishing Protocol will be an RFC substantially identical to draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-17; it’ll join RFC4287 as the official products of the IETF Atompub Working Group."
via Danny Ayers

What does that mean in english? Basically that the Atom Publishing Protocol is almost finished. It's not yet 'official', but it's all over bar the shouting. There is already an Atom syndication format, which is a competitor to the more widely used RSS 2.0. The term 'Atom' is used to refer to both the syndication and the publishing standards - and ultimately Atom aims to enhance feeds on the Web.

Things are moving along nicely for the RSS 2.0 spec too, with Version 2.0.9 being published in June. So now is a good time to compare progress of the two competing feed standards. RSS 2.0 is the market leader, but a number of things point to a promising near future for Atom.

]]> Syndication Wars: Then and Now

Remember the Syndication Wars in the early part of this century? It started out as RSS 1.0 vs 2.0, then in 2003 Atom (nee Echo) replaced RSS 1.0 as the 'alternative'. RSS 2.0 came out the victor over both 1.0 and Atom, thanks mainly to bigco support from Microsoft and Yahoo. And the fact it is much easier for publishers to implement ( the middle 'S' stands for 'Simple').

However Atom, a more complicated but much more powerful feed standard, has always had a lot of support - notably from Google. And now that the search giant owns the largest feed management service in the world (Feedburner) and runs an increasingly popular and sophisticated RSS Reader (Google Reader), does that mean Atom's time is coming - very soon?

The Syndication Wars are still smoldering away, even though they don't dominate blog headlines like they used to when I started blogging in 2002/03. At that time, Dave Winer's blog Scripting News and Mark Pilgrim's blog diveintomark were among the most popular tech blogs. Winer was the main creator of RSS 2.0 and Pilgrim was one of the co-creators of Atom, so their blogs became battlegrounds in the Syndication Wars. Over the past 4-5 years, those battles have died down - Winer and Pilgrim in particular got burned out by the fighting. Nevertheless the debate about the relative merits of RSS 2.0 and Atom is still active among feed geeks. The response to RSS 2.0.9 by Atom co-creator (he also co-created XML) Tim Bray demonstrates this:

"Yep, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like there’s trouble on the horizon. On the RFC4287 syndication-format front, it may have been stable since 2005 and widely deployed, but watch out, there’s a new version of RSS 2.0! (2.0.9, to be precise). RSS 2.0 is sort of RFC4287’s main competition, and if there are two different specs, I guess that must mean it’s twice as good."

The sarcasm in that post didn't escape the attention of RSS 2.0 advocate, and a key member of the RSS Advisory Board, Rogers Cadenhead. He replied that RSS 2.0 is "winning by a large margin" against Atom:

"According to the latest stats on Syndic8, 80.6 percent of the 510,000 feeds in its database are RSS feeds and 82.1 percent of those are in RSS 2.0 format. Atom totals 16.6 percent.

Atom isn't gaining market share in Syndic8, either. As of February 2006, 77.8 percent of its 455,000 feeds were RSS, 18.1 percent were Atom, and 68.2 percent of the RSS feeds were in RSS 2.0 format."

Atom's Threat to RSS 2.0

It's obvious that RSS 2.0 is still the dominant publishing standard for feeds. Even so, Google has the potential to be the kingmaker in the Syndication Wars very soon.

Dave Winer argued recently that Feedburner is trouble. Robert Scoble added that the RSS Advisory Board is under the control of bigcos now, including Google. In both cases I don't think it's that bad - Feedburner is not an 'evil' company (I like and respect the people who run it) and there are enough non-bigco reps on the RSS Advisory Board (Rogers and Randy Charles Morin, to name two). However I do think that Google's acquisition of Feedburner makes them much more influential in the Syndication Wars. Whether they use this power or not, Google now has the muscle to convert publishers to Atom - via Feedburner, or Google Reader, or indeed any another popular Google product that is based on feeds.

Note: it was noticeable that Feedburner's representative on The RSS Advisory Board, Eric Lunt, was the only board member to vote against Version 2.0.9. I'm sure there's a reasonable - and technical - explanation. But what was it?

Randy Charles Morin, a member of the RSS Advisory Board, defuses any suggestion that Google is trying to take control of RSS. And I agree with him - there's no evidence that Google wants to control RSS 2.0 or indeed replace it with Atom. But I would suggest that it's inevitable that Google will use its influence to push Atom forward, which will please those people who want to see feeds used in a more sophisticated way.

My prediction is that Google's influence will see Atom become the dominant feed publishing standard within the next few years.

And that may actually be a good thing long-term for feeds. The main advantage of RSS 2.0 is it's simplicity for publishers. But with tools like Feedburner's SmartFeed (which makes your feed compatible with any RSS Reader), publishers nowadays don't need to worry about the code behind feeds. So that opens the way for a more complicated format with more power - like Atom. [Update: in the comments, Tim Bray points to this comparison between Atom and RSS 2.0] Interestingly, even Rogers Cadenhead seems to agree that Atom is the future, as he commented on Danny Ayer's blog that "I think the move [by Atom] to couple a syndication format with a web service API was genius."

What do you think - is Atom near the tipping point to usurp RSS 2.0? I don't claim to be an expert in the minutae of the Syndication Wars, so your comments or clarifications are welcome.

Comment from Tim on 2007-07-25

2007-07-26T00:15:47Z

This comparison may be useful to your readers. The statement that Atom is more complex needs some supporting evidence; in fact, it has fewer elements than RSS 2.0. My impression is that the complexity of generating an Atom feed is a little higher than for RSS 2.0, and for consuming one somewhat lower; but I doubt most programmers would consider the difference a big deal.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-07-25

2007-07-26T00:23:42Z

Thanks for that Tim, I added the link to the second-to-last paragraph.

Comment from Anon on 2007-07-25

2007-07-26T00:32:30Z

Umm.. Tim Bray was talking about the Atom Publishing Protocol, NOT the Atom feed format:
The term ‚ÄúAtom‚Ä? is hopelessly vague, and most people use it to refer the feed format, which is fine. We could say ‚ÄúAtom Protocol‚Ä? or ‚ÄúAPP‚Ä? or ‚ÄúAtompub‚Ä?; let‚Äôs see what shakes out

The Atom feed format has been finalized since last year.

(The Syndication format wars you refer to back in 2000-2003 were more RSS 0.92/2.0 vs RSS 1.0)

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-07-25

2007-07-26T02:00:37Z

Thanks for the clarification Anon, I updated the intro to make it clearer.

I agree the syndication wars of 2000-03 started out as 0.92/2.0 vs 1.0, but it morphed into a RSS 2.0 vs Atom one in mid-2003 (Atom was known as Echo at the time).

Comment from Andrew on 2007-07-25

2007-07-26T02:30:11Z

May I suggest a further edit of this post? All but a few paras are about the Atom Syndication Format and how it contrasts with RSS.
It is therefore misleading to start with a statement about the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). I'd move that stuff down to a footnote, and thus get the reader's attention on the Atom Syndication Format right away.
Apart from that, I welcome the post, and I welcome RSS week!

Comment from David on 2007-07-25

2007-07-26T02:58:24Z

For the most part, feedreaders have put an end to the war. One format might "win", but so few will have ever realized they fought.

Comment from info._hughman on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T07:07:26Z

I want know about the difference between a RSS format and a atom format. Its seems new to me. i just want to know both are same or different.

Comment from jonasb on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T08:30:57Z

Here is a (somewhat old) tutorial describing the basic
differences between the atom and rss formats (as well as
some other blogging jargon):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/04/XMLFiles/

Comment from Konstantin on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T09:01:42Z

As a dev of a feed library (FeedDotNet), I'm with Atom. It's feature-enabled and a way richer than RSS. Yes, the comparision above says it all.

Comment from Thijs on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T09:40:20Z

RSS = Really Simple Syndication. Atom's problem is, that it is not that simple.

Comment from paul on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T10:08:02Z

The Atom feed format is an upgrade to RSS and as more and more publishers gradate to it we will arrive at a tipping point.

There is so much that needs to be done along the lines of Tagging, attention and identity; Atom will help move us along.

Comment from Sam Sethi on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T11:48:02Z

Hi Richard

Good post but I think the main point has been missed. This is not really about Atom 1.0 v RSS 2.0

This is more about the Atom Publishing Protocol replacing XML-PRC (also invented by Dave Winer) to provide a richer mechanism for publishing data.

Today the HTTP available methods http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html are vastly under used. i.e we only use HTTP POST for to publish data.

We don't seem to use GET, DELETE, HEAD etc. Google is an APP supporter and has extended APP to add in QUERY as a method. This is now know as GDATA (I which they had not renamed it).

What this means is we can look to create Atom Stores (think SQLite) that not only can be posted to but queried etc. There is already a project to replace Wordpress MySQL with a SQLite 3.0 database.

SQLite is also the database used by Google Gears, Firefox 3 to create offline stores for G-Reader (today) and GMail (soon). Also you should note that Abobe AIR can use SQLite to create RIA's.

all this means is that we can now think of have intelligent data stores that are RESTful that can be interrogated via HTTP methods via APP both offline and online.

Finally the one piece not talked about much is HHTP HEAD which is one possible method Google will use to synchronise the offline data cache with the online master store.

Bottomline: RSS 2.0 (with or without Dublin core), XML-RPC and SOAP are going to be replaced by Atom 1.0, APP and RESTful - http://safari.oreilly.com/9780596529260

RSS 2.09 is a red herring when discussing APP.

Comment from Dave Winer on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T12:27:41Z

Richard, so disappointing that you feed the drama. People expressing opinions is not a "war." It's so chilling, so stifling to free expression when people call opinion expressing a war.

Comment from Nicole Simon on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T12:39:03Z

Simple is good enough if the cause of what you would like to do is still simple. But as we move more and more to a compex world, simple solutions are not good enough any more.

You can't enhance on content and meta data without making it more "complicated".

But what acutally is complicated and for whom? I do not write any feed by hand, all is done by other application for me. The writers of such applications need to understand how Atom or RSS works, but seriously - if they are not capable of dealing with a not so simple format they should not be pubilshing RSS either.

Comment from bernard lunn on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T14:13:31Z

Richard, I missed the battle first time around but what it seems like is one of those religious wars that consumes the IT industry every few years like Java or .Net. My sense is that RSS is into the mainstream, crossed the chasm as it were, and it would be a shame to derail that with an alternative standard unless there was a fundamental issue with the standard.
Today we all use RSS. What I have not seen is why as a) a Publisher and b) a Consumer of content I should care about Atom. My sense is that Atom offers tools to developers that would enable them to offer things to Publishers/Consumers at some future data that they would care about? Is that about right? Sam, that was my takeaway from your post.
If so, RSS will be more entrenched with publishers/consumers by the time new "ATOM apps" come along. So it will have to be co-existance not replacement?
It would be interesting to see some "what if" imagineering on what these new "ATOM apps" would do for users.
Is this by any chance Google dipping into the Microsoft playbook?

Comment from Dave Winer on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T14:51:59Z

After morning coffee...

Sam, I have to admit that I haven't been following the development of the Atom protocol, so I'm curious to know what's behind "provide a richer mechanism for publishing data."

Also you've conflated APP with XML-RPC which isn't accurate. It's comparable to the Metaweblog API, which is implemented in XML-RPC, which is useful for many other things beyond web publishing (although that's why I got involved in creating it, along with three guys from Microsoft, Mohsen, Bob and Don, who should also get credit for it's invention).

The Metaweblog API, like RSS 2.0, which it is based on, isn't going to disappear because the IETF says it should (and they haven't said that and I hope they don't). There are lots of tolls for the Read-Write-Web that are based on the Metaweblog API, and while there may be some publishing environments that force them to support APP because they don't implement MWAPI, it's not clear that that's a good thing (my opinion, not warfare).

This stuff is already fairly fragile and hard for users to configure. Adding another moving part seems to be going in the wrong direction, yet another thing that can fail.

There's definitely good material here for another piece Richard, one that gets to the bottom of the claims that one format or protocol is better than another. Could you try to sort that out, and stick to real benefits and not vague stuff. If there are really important things that can't be done any other way, I'll be the first to sing their praises. Really. I love what you can do with the technology, that's why I work on it. But I really get impatient with people who say their's is better and we should throw out stuff that works just because the say you should.

Comment from Richard MacManus on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T19:55:46Z

Thanks all for your comments. Sam and Dave, I particularly liked your takes (and so voted them up in sezwho :) ).

Dave, sorry for any offence taken re the war metaphor. I was just trying to convey that it was a very 'robust' set of discussions that occurred 4-5 + years ago. And there were definitely two sides. But I will dig more into the current debates and try not to let my literary sensibilities get in the way for the next post ;-)

Comment from Randy Charles Morin on 2007-07-26

2007-07-26T20:08:06Z

Conventional marketing suggests that it's implausible to knock off #1. HTML is no where near as good as SVG or flash, but once u get the #1 status, people and companies just buy in. Atom is a replacement for RSS. In order to knock off RSS, someone will have to come up with completely ground breaking format. Not one that is slightly better formats, in some people's opinions.

In fact, RSS 2.0 has continued to gain market share in the past year and all other formats including Atom continue to lose market share.