Atom graduates to 1.0

Anand Jain reports the release of Atom 1.0. Here’s the summary of comparison with RSS 2.0.

  • There is way to indicate whether the payload is HTML, TXT, or sthg. else. This was a major shortcoming in RSS 2.0. More than that, if the payload happened to be raw HTML, the generators encapsulate the payload in CDATA. This causes major headaches in parsing.
  • Title, Unique Identifier, and a last updated timestamp are a required field both in feed and entry
  • Atom has a new publishing protocol. This was much expected since RSS has MWA as the drumbeat.
  • Atom will turn into a spec. under the auspices of IETF
  • The Atom working group is also coming out with a “pub-sub” extension model for aggregation and notification using XMPP as the transport. This will allow content update/change notifications to be sent to an Instant Messenger (or any other web/desktop client) supporting XMPP protocol.
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