The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements. At that point, I can't fathom what advantages there is to the producer to not just produce an Atom feed.
RSS 1.0 was basically the first attempt to produce something like Atom without reinventing too much, but Dave threw his toys out of the pram, so the only option was to reinvent it with a different name and clean up the remaining sharp corners.
It's tragically funny. Atom is both more correct and easier to produce and parse than any RSS variant.
Were I to join Automattic in the morning, the first thing I'd try is to attempt to get them to abandon their weird RSS mashup as their default feed format. There's no good reason why Wordpress still generates RSS feeds.
Yes, I'm a bit bitter, but I was in the feed wars, and it still stings.
> The craziest thing I see though is people importing the Atom namespace into RSS feeds to get some of the elements.
Interestingly enough you can’t to do the reverse: because RSS never got a proper XML namespace, its elements can’t be embedded into other XML. I can understand that the early RSS 0.9x efforts didn’t do XML namespaces since those were rather new then, but the publication of RSS 2.0 could have been the right moment to introduce one, I think.
Atom is a great feed format with a rock-solid spec.
I wouldn't call it a weird mashup for WordPress to use atom:link in their RSS feeds. It does things no RSS element can do, such as allow a feed to identify its own URL.
For those who don't know, every WordPress site with an RSS feed also has an Atom feed available by adding "/atom" to the end of the RSS feed URL, such as this:
RSS 1.0 was basically the first attempt to produce something like Atom without reinventing too much, but Dave threw his toys out of the pram, so the only option was to reinvent it with a different name and clean up the remaining sharp corners.
It's tragically funny. Atom is both more correct and easier to produce and parse than any RSS variant.
Were I to join Automattic in the morning, the first thing I'd try is to attempt to get them to abandon their weird RSS mashup as their default feed format. There's no good reason why Wordpress still generates RSS feeds.
Yes, I'm a bit bitter, but I was in the feed wars, and it still stings.