layout: post title: Dave Winer Impressed Me Today created: 1086020319 categories:

• Web Development
• Personal Publishing

And Mark Pilgrim <strike>depressed</strike> disgusted me.

Here's what Dave Winer wrote in a long flame war on ATOM vs. RSS that broke out over on Scoble's comments:

Update: Dave is committed to making this work. See his trial balloon.

To summarize: Atom has an advantage over RSS in that a content provider can, if necessary, tell the aggregator specifically how to process the equivalent of RSS's description element.

If RSS was to match Atom, it would either have to directly adopt Atom's content model (breaking the roadmap, not good) or recommend the use of a namespaced element (preserving the roadmap) or just use Atom's content model (the best solution, imho). Then we would recommend to aggregator developers that they support this subset of Atom, where present, when processing RSS 2.0 feeds.

Scoble Comments: Dave Winer

Way to go, Dave. I think I'll have to start reading you again, rather than just triangulating you from other people's comments. While I'm a firm believer in Atom as two-way web enabler, infighting amongst the greater community of syndication proponents doesn't help anybody.

Can't we just agree that RSS 3.0 == Atom? This doesn't mean the 1.0 or 2.0 lineages stop developing, and seems to be a nice thing to get behind.