RSS vs. Atom

[Joseph Witchard]

Is there a need for both an RSS and Atom feed on a website, or an argument to use one over the other? I have both on my website, but from what I can tell on Firefox live bookmarks, they basically do the same thing.

[Charles]

It really just depends upon what you are doing with the feed and how you are generating it. If it's being auto generated then my thought is always the more the better. If by hand you have to ask just what the feed will be used for. If you are just pushing out stuff to humans then the more simple is better. If you are trying to communicate to machines and give users and user agents lots of possibilities then the more info the better.

[Joseph Witchard]

Both my Atom and RSS feeds are fed by MySQL and generated by PHP.

[rnd me]

my two cents: stick with rss. if rss is the swiss army knife of repetitive data, atom is a 16 drawer steel toolchest on casters.

[Charles]

I agree with you on the tool chest image but RSS is not Swiss Army knife. It does one thing but it does it well. If all you want is that one thing then go for RSS but if you want to give your users some more options then use Atom.

[rnd me]

Originally Posted by Charles

I agree with you on the tool chest image but RSS is not Swiss Army knife. It does one thing but it does it well.

i think rss does a lot of things from podcast subscriptions, site change logs, news wire stories, to event announcements. don't forget that rss can be enhanced by extensions; dublin core, itunes, yahoo, etc. Even with all the extra info tucked in, i can still use an rss feed just fine in any reader.

i did a massive rss study three years ago (might be impossible now), and at that time 68% of feeds were 2.0, and atom was only 7%. if we pretend that those numbers are browser statistics, it's obvious me what system you should develop for. atom is a full (r/w) publishing protocol, rss is more of a stream-acting RESTful data resource.

but ether one can be used for the things most rss2.0 feeds do.
They both show up in browsers just fine nowadays, though atom probably doesn't have as many apps/widgets that can use it.

[Joseph Witchard]

What options can you give your users with Atom?

[Charles]

With Atom you are giving them more meta-information. The chances are, I admit, really small that any one is going to make use of that information. But someone just might. That's why I wrote above, if you are typing this out then use RSS. Otherwise you have options.

But the browser analogy doesn't hold. You don't want to know what syndication is used, you want to know what syndication is supported. Just because nobody uses a particular color doesn't mean that your web site should eschew it.

And, of course, the best of all possible worlds to the users is options. Best to give them both in this instance.

[Joseph Witchard]

So since I'm using PHP to generate both feeds rather than update them by hand, it's beneficial to use both?

[Charles]

Why wouldn't it be?

[rnd me]

Originally Posted by Charles

Why wouldn't it be?

one reason, and this might just be a personal thing that only bothers me, but i don't like being offered more than one or two feeds by firefox because i often click the wrong one. when i click the rss icon, i'm not expecting to have to make a choice. it a usability thing.



if a choice will seldom be used, it might be worth the efficiency of not forcing a decision upon the user. in web, less is often more; google vs yahoo front pages for example...