Re: RSS vs Atom

[MJ Ray]

Davi Leal <address@hidden> wrote:
> > [task]: Add RSS/Atom/etc. feeds
> >         http://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?6724
>
> I propose we use Atom 1.0 because of:
>
>   * All the modern tools support both Atom and RSS.
>
>   * The Atom Publishing Protocol was issued as a proposed standard
>     in IETF RFC 5023 in October 2007.
>
>   * Atom is said to be more powerful and flexible than RSS.
>
>   * Google is using Atom.

I propose we use RDF Site Summary (RSS-1) because:

* RDF was originally issued as a full W3C Recommendation in 1999 and
the current specification dates from 2004 - it is stable and mature
and there are far more resources available for using it;

* Some modern tools do not support Atom directly, but translate it to
RSS internally (I've worked on some of them... atom2rss.xsl anyone?);

* RDF is said to be more powerful and flexible than Atom - and as XML,
it can also be merged with other XML formats by using namespaces;

* Many of the basic parts of Atom are irrelevant for our uses;

* The RSS-1 specification is available as free software
http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec
while I think RFC 5023 is not.

* Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search are all using RSS (although
some use the more limited RSS-2 version - but it's a simpler
translation than Atom to RSS) and about four times as many sites offer
RSS as Atom (according to my web searches).

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
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