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Last post regarding XML applications, I talked about XHTML a bit. In this post, let us glance at another application of XML - the feeds. I can better state it as RSS and Atom, instead of feed, since these terms have been quite ubiquitous.

Feeds let us keep ourselves up to date with a particular site, and the technologies that let us do this are the feed formats RSS or Atom, both applications of XML. These feeds formats follow the XML specifications. We will not talk much about RSS, here as there is already a post at Splat for it. Instead, we will look into the Atom format and also the kind of friction that seems to exist between them.

RSS as a syndication or feed format had its debut at around 2002. Atom, is actually a evolution of the format, and seems to have been incepted around mid-2003. As I mentioned earlier both these formats are based on the XML specifications. Then one would ask, what is the difference? Why do we need two formats?

Atom seems to have been formulated to over come some of the difficulties that RSS formats had. Remember that there have been many flavors of RSS. One of the main feature of Atom, is that the data encoded in a entry can be defined to be a plain text, XHTML or other form of data. In RSS, there is no fool-proof way of knowing what is coming through. As a result of which, there is a possibility of different feed-readers would render or present the data of an entry differently.

You can have a glance down the wikipedia page for the Atom format, for other different issues of RSS that Atom addresses.

There is something that we have to ask though. Is XML not supposed to be our “savior” and free us from the specific system dependencies? We already had several different flavors of RSS in our basket of syndication format. Now, there is Atom thrown into the basket. Does that really leave us with a neutral format to share data in general, and syndication in specific?

The different flavors of RSS and Atom, seem to be taken backward. It at least feels like that.

Or may be, these are necessary steps to be taken in order to get that one standard format.  It will be difficult with a lot many people working on these different formats.  It will be difficult for them to come to a consensus.  But that will be a necessary step too, else we will not be seeing any standard for feeds.