What is Atom? How does it Compare to RSS?

By leelefever on April 1, 2004 - 9:22am.

• Categories:
• Technology in Plain English
• Comments: 0

As you can see in the right nav, I’m now offering two different “feeds” for my site, Atom and RSS. Having both may prompt you to ask “What’s the difference? Why have both? What are they for anyway?”

What you need to know is that they do the same thing. They allow Internet users subscribe to a “feed” from a web site. By subscribing to a feed, a user can be notified when a website has been updated. More on this here.

The whole RSS vs. Atom history is rich and interesting, but I’ll spare you. Just know this: RSS came first, it worked, but was deemed imperfect by many. Updated: Be sure to check out Dave Winer's Version History of RSS.

However, the RSS concept was so good that it brought together a wide variety of developers and companies to develop a new syndication format that would benefit everyone equally. This new format is called Atom and you could call it a competitor to RSS.

So, there are now two basic formats for syndicating a web site. RSS is older with many different versions, Atom is newer, more standard, and only beginning to be adopted. Atom was constructed to work across a wide variety of platforms and devices.

I offer both so that I do not exclude any user from subscribing from my site. I would personally like to see Atom become the leading format because it is built by a diverse community who “baked-in” the ability for Atom to evolve with consistency over time.

For more info:

The Atom Wiki (motivation page)
Webmonkey: Mighty Atom -Really Similar Syndication?
Atom Enabled.org

If you are a Movable Type user, you can get the Atom index template from the site.