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Ask HN: Why RSS resurgence instead of Atom?

by Communitivity on 12/11/23, 1:25 PM with 4 comments

I've seen several posts here and elsewhere touting RSS support or advocating a resurgence of RSS.

In my experience Atom, and the Atom Publishing Protocol, are much superior technically to RSS. There's a JSON version, richer vocabulary, more specific about the content being transmitted, Atom is an IETF standard, namespaces support, and full internationalization.

However, RSS seems to be the one in resurgence. I'm looking for people thoughts on why. I'd also love thoughts on how Atom could have its own resurgence.

Some of the differences are also discussed in more detail here: http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-rss-and-atom/

  • by MatthiasPortzel on 12/11/23, 1:29 PM

    People use RSS to describe the idea; the fact that the actual technology is frequently Atom is poorly understood. People still use “SSL” to refer to tunneled encryption even though the SSL protocol is no longer in common use.

  • by ttepasse on 12/11/23, 7:47 PM

    Technical nitpick: JSONFeed is something different and can’t express the full Atom data model.

    I n'th the suggestion that “RSS” has annoyingly become the general term for feeds, maybe because the latter term is maybe too generic.

    But RSS also has a technical holdout because the major podcasting platforms and players seem to only support RSS. Apple’s Podcasting directory stopped supporting Atom feeds last year. It shouldn't be, Atom feeds can do anything and you can of course use the necessary extension elements in Atom – but culturally the podcasting ecosystem is on this weird road.

  • by fabianholzer on 12/11/23, 1:32 PM

    I think people use the term RSS pars pro toto for the generic idea of feeds.