Eight Reasons Why Atom kicks RSS Ass

Tim Bray recently posted this note to the IETF ATOM-WG mailing list outlining a number of areas where Atom bests RSS 2.0...

There's zero ambiguity about single and double escaping, you can use whichever suits your publication process better and not worry about silent data loss.
You can include binary chunks right there in-feed, base64 encoded.
You get help for aggregate feeds using atom:origin.
You have a date, atom:updated, with cleanly-specified semantics ("publisher says something changed") that's *guaranteed to be there* per-entry.
It's in an XML namespace.
It's got a good accessibility story: you have to have an atom:summary if there's no src= or it's binary.
You have clean semantics for linking to the entry this describes or the entry it's talking about.

[via Don Park, via Dave Winer]

...and my own addition to his list;

Tim Bray seems to have a much better grasp of irony than Dave Winer.

Wait...you say he was being serious? Err...Does Atom do Podcasting? ummm...

In all seriousness, this seems to be turning out to be quite an unproductive exercise. Like Don, I had great hopes that this exercise would produce better APIs for everyone to latch onto. What seems to have happened is that an RSS-Clone has been produced. I mean, I could have done that in my spare time without wasting everyone's time and attention. Perhaps Google wouldn't have bought into my branch, but the end result probably would be pretty much the same.

Imagine if the design of the email infrastructure had progressed along these lines? We'd still be focused on improving the x.500 spec to make it more precise and not yet gotten to a serious conversation about transport and exchange. Sigh.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh, but I really don't get what the goals of this effort are or what value it brings to the table. We (...or "I", its not like this is an official pronouncement or anything...) will still maintain a cautious and informal committment to Atom, but here's a real serious kicker that this development group needs to get straight;

Businesses are driven by ROI. Supporting Atom doesn't produce a particularly compelling ROI analysis unless you have some superior strategic imperative driving you (like, sayyy...Google forking to prevent Microsoft from fully leveraging RSS against them...) If the product managers of the world can't get a positive result when they run their numbers, do you think that Atom is going to end up finding its way into the nooks and crannies of the product space like it needs to in order to be successful?
Let's put it this way, I'm not running around here at Tucows trying to convince our product managers that Atom is the next great thing and they need to support it in their products. My credibility is worth more than that. The Atom development team isn't giving me anything to compelling enough to talk about.
The RSS development team has.