It never ceases to frustrate me that these sorts of articles invariably focus on RSS, and say little to nothing about Atom.
This article mentions Atom once:
> (Note: there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom", but all modern apps work equally with both.)
Here’s what I say about it:
If you’re doing podcasts, use RSS, because almost nothing supports Atom there, because for all practical purposes Apple took over and froze the ecosystem at a certain point in time that was just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS.
If you’re doing any other type of feed, use Atom, because it’s technically substantially superior to RSS and supported just as well.
Where Atom and RSS are both supported, you should always prefer Atom, because RSS has the potential to mess things up because it leaves the client to guess whether certain fields are text or HTML. RSS is simply a hopelessly incorrect format, whereas Atom models content types properly. RSS is even harder to write correctly than Atom, due to things like using a weird date format.
I think arguing RSS versus Atom is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic: It's a stupid waste of discussion points, because they are so interchangeable. Let's focus on the general concept of getting feed readers back in to vogue, then push our preferred format.
It’s not terribly common in general, but in content about HTML, if you put things like HTML tag names in titles, it will get mangled by some (most?) feed readers if the feed is RSS. I’ve seen such titles that are broken because the publishers didn’t use Atom more than a few times, and written a couple of titles myself that show up fine because I produce Atom rather than RSS. (I also put things like <em> and <code> in my titles for italics and monospacing, though most feed readers will strip that out and reduce HTML titles to plain text. The almost universal convention that titles are plain text with no formatting is silly.)
RSS is worse than Atom in real, practical ways. Unless there’s a concrete reason for you to use RSS (which largely means “it’s a podcast”), you should use Atom, because it will protect your content against being mangled when you have things like less than signs and ampersands in it.
Returning back to the matter of the naming: I think there are two sound reasons to stop calling it “RSS” and start calling it “feeds”:
① Using one specific, inferior technology to describe it is factually wrong, and perpetuates the wrongness and inferiority, because people hear of RSS and so implement RSS, rather than Atom.
② When someone isn’t familiar with the stuff, “RSS” is just a meaningless name (or could remind you of other organisations that use the acronym, e.g. in India it means commonly-extremist Hindu nationalism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh), but “feeds” invokes a concept that is more likely to be familiar and immediately understood.
This article mentions Atom once:
> (Note: there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom", but all modern apps work equally with both.)
Here’s what I say about it:
If you’re doing podcasts, use RSS, because almost nothing supports Atom there, because for all practical purposes Apple took over and froze the ecosystem at a certain point in time that was just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS.
If you’re doing any other type of feed, use Atom, because it’s technically substantially superior to RSS and supported just as well.
Where Atom and RSS are both supported, you should always prefer Atom, because RSS has the potential to mess things up because it leaves the client to guess whether certain fields are text or HTML. RSS is simply a hopelessly incorrect format, whereas Atom models content types properly. RSS is even harder to write correctly than Atom, due to things like using a weird date format.
(Look through older comments of mine for more explanation and reasons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....)
Can we please stop talking about RSS and talk about feeds? A bit like we finally mostly stopped talking about SSL in favour of TLS.