Atom Feed Format Was Born 20 Years Ago (rssboard.org) 5
RSS Advisory Board: This month marks the 20th anniversary of the effort that became the Atom feed format. It all began on June 16, 2003, with a blog post from Apache Software Foundation contributor Sam Ruby asking for feedback about what constitutes a well-formed blog entry. The development of RSS 2.0 had been an unplanned hopscotch from a small group at Netscape to a smaller one at UserLand Software, but Atom was a barn raising. Hundreds of software developers, web publishers and technologists gathered for a discussion in the abstract that led to a concrete effort to build a well-specified syndication format and associated publishing API that could become Internet standards. Work was done on a project wiki that grew to over 1,500 pages. Everything was up for a vote, including a plebiscite on choosing a name that ballooned into a four-month-long bikeshed discussion in which Pie, Echo, Wingnut, Feedcast, Phaistos and several dozen alternatives finally, mercifully, miraculously lost out to Atom.
The road map of the Atom wiki lists the people, companies and projects that jumped at the chance to create a new format for feeds. XML specification co-author Tim Bray wrote: "The time to write it all down and standardize it is not when you're first struggling to invent the technology. We now have aggregators and publishing systems and search engines and you-name-it, and I think the community collectively understands pretty well what you need, what you don't need, and what a good syntax looks like. So, now's the time."
The road map of the Atom wiki lists the people, companies and projects that jumped at the chance to create a new format for feeds. XML specification co-author Tim Bray wrote: "The time to write it all down and standardize it is not when you're first struggling to invent the technology. We now have aggregators and publishing systems and search engines and you-name-it, and I think the community collectively understands pretty well what you need, what you don't need, and what a good syntax looks like. So, now's the time."
HEY LOOK EVERYONE IT'S ATOM (Score:3, Insightful)
IT'S NEW! IT'S AWESOME! IT'S RSS EVOLVED!
Aaaaaaand it's dead. Sites really don't do the syndication thing anymore, last I checked I REALLY had to dig hard.
Re:HEY LOOK EVERYONE IT'S ATOM (Score:5, Informative)
Sites really don't do the syndication thing anymore, last I checked I REALLY had to dig hard.
I subscribe to dozens of RSS feeds. Even this site has a feed. You must not know where to look.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sites really don't do the syndication thing anymore, last I checked I REALLY had to dig hard.
Every single YouTube channel has a feed. Every single YouTube playlist has one as well. Every single subreddit has one. The 43% of websites on the Internet that run on WordPress (yes, that's the 2023 number, which I find surprising) have multiple feeds enabled by default. Every wiki built on MediaWiki has feeds for each article, as well as a bevy of general feeds. Every single Mastodon user has one. Most news sites (including Slashdot, which is how I check it) have multiple feeds broken down by category. Po