FRESH

Hacker News

Introduction to Atom

131 points by susam

by rippeltippel

3 subcomments

At this point, developers have named so many projects "Atom" that there are officially more Atoms in the world than there are atoms in the universe.

by mplanchard

0 subcomment

I hand-rolled an atom feed for my statically generated blog. It’s a reasonable, easy format to work with.

by eterevsky

5 subcomments

by cxr

0 subcomment

by echelon

1 subcomments

by intrasight

1 subcomments

by j16sdiz

1 subcomments

by drob518

0 subcomment

by tkcranny

4 subcomments

I’m not clear on the difference between atom and RSS. Atom seemed to be the better spec, but for my Astro blog I ended up sticking to the built in `rss` helper it ships with.

by perrohunter

1 subcomments

by eduction

0 subcomment

As a digital pedant I am very sympathetic to what prompted the creation of Atom. RSS2 for example under-specifies item "description" and "title," in particular how to put HTML in there, and using the most once-most-common technique (entity escaping HTML) makes it tricky to reliably do more basic things (encode/decode left angle brackets and ampersands, because now you don't know whether to do so singly or doubly).
But the undeniable victory of RSS shows the importance of being first and "easy" (even when "easy" means sweeping edge case problems under the rug). And of humans: Major publishers like the New York Times had adopted RSS and saw no need to switch to Atom because it was good enough. I'd argue the (also underspecified) CSV format is another example of this phenomenon.
(As for the entity escaping dilemma, people mostly just moved to using CDATA for their feed-embeded HTML, although I imagine people who write RSS readers still need to come up with semantics for figuring out if a title or description payload contains encoded html or not.)

by bossyTeacher

2 subcomments

So many words to choose and they had to choose one that already has been used before. Why are techies so devoid of imagination?