Often I will go to subscribe to a feed and get a list of rss options. I always just randomly choose one, but would like to know the difference. Anyone know?
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Wasatch Girl Digital Footprint
Often I will go to subscribe to a feed and get a list of rss options. I always just randomly choose one, but would like to know the difference. Anyone know?
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Write a Comment»Well, you can’t really compete with Joey’s description above really!
the curse of multiple formats though: while it’s o.k. for the likes of technically minded people to either understand this, or just ignore it (you have to be comfortable and not ’scared’ of computers to be willing to do this (as someone who’s comfortable using the internet what they would do….).
The likes of Feedburner hopefully negate this issue. Their app decides what is the best format for your browser or feed reader. Very useful.
Like the high definition war, multiple formats confuses people and puts them off. Make sense?
Web feeds are ways for a site to broadcast changes or new articles so that people can be alerted. The reason they are so powerful is because the internet gurus decided on a standardized way of writing the feed so that anyone can interpret them. That’s why you can have just one reader that is able to tell you of all the updates.
RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and ATOM are all different standards. First came RSS 1.0 that stood for “really simple syndication.” After a while, they started adding features to the specification so they created RSS 2.0. Once things really got on a roll, people started imagining all kinds of interesting things that could be done with web feeds, but the framework for RSS did not support these ideas. So, they started a new standard called ATOM to allow for these new ideas to work.
It’s kind of like the difference between fancy email and a text-only message. With email, we can do different fonts, attachments, etc… so the format is harder to write than a simple text message. When people don’t want to mess with the advanced features, they just use RSS instead of ATOM. The problem is that we are stuck having to maintain two different standards.
ATOM (http://atomenabled.org) now has a governing body that writes an official specification for web feeds. ATOM is generally accepted to be superior to RSS, so when you have the chance, choose the ATOM feed. Most feed readers today support both RSS and ATOM, but ATOM is just a higher-tech solution.