I think it caught on well enough, platforms such as Wordpress still support it out of the box (I just checked my blog, it works).
I liked Atom's clean design but it felt it was mostly pushed by Google (I may be misremembering) and in the end the syndicated web faded into obscurity anyway.
The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation.
Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
I’m not clear on the difference between atom and RSS. Atom seemed to be the better spec, but for my Astro blog I ended up sticking to the built in `rss` helper it ships with.
In the beginning was RSS 0.x. It was originally intended to be based on RDF. Compromises were made and it ended up dropping the RDF. The spec. wasn’t very good and had several ambiguities.
Some people forged ahead with a cleaned up RDF-based version and called it RSS 1.0, while other people went ahead with the ambiguities but without RDF and called it RSS 2.0. The person publishing RSS 2.0 considered it finished and refused to update it. There was drama.
A bunch of people decided that there was too much to clean up from within that mess and started a new format, Atom. This ended up being a much better spec. with an official RFC, but at this point everybody was calling any type of feed “RSS”, even if it was Atom.
Nothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.
Lots of sites publish outages, incidents, downtime over RSS/atom. Works great for monitoring, post them into slack with a bot and you can start a discussion thread about that incident where you first hear about it.
At this point, developers have named so many projects "Atom" that there are officially more Atoms in the world than there are atoms in the universe.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287
Dec 2005
I think at that time it was still ok?
This one is (was) pretty important.
The hyperscalers stopped that timeline from winning, though.
How is this the hyperscalers fault?
YouTube had atom feeds and I don't think Amazon and Microsoft have relevant syndication.
Meta is surely responsible but that's it, imo.
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It was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.
I thought it did in fact catch on but most people still referred to it as "RSS".
Docusaurus supports it out of the box as well https://docusaurus.io/blog/atom.xml
I think it caught on well enough, platforms such as Wordpress still support it out of the box (I just checked my blog, it works).
I liked Atom's clean design but it felt it was mostly pushed by Google (I may be misremembering) and in the end the syndicated web faded into obscurity anyway.
IIRC RSS 2.0 included most of what Atom has, no?
Not really, and it's still more error-prone than Atom.
There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.
I hand-rolled an atom feed for my statically generated blog. It’s a reasonable, easy format to work with.
IIRC, Aaron Swartz was one of the contributors to the format. RIP.
Well, that’s a blast from the past.
First iteration of Google's APIs were atom. I do miss XML.
One of the API providers I use at work returns responses in XML and we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect.
What do you like about XML? I feel like I'm missing something.
The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation.
Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
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XLM had DTDs and Schemas 20 years ago.
JSON is still figuring it out.
I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
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I’m not clear on the difference between atom and RSS. Atom seemed to be the better spec, but for my Astro blog I ended up sticking to the built in `rss` helper it ships with.
In the beginning was RSS 0.x. It was originally intended to be based on RDF. Compromises were made and it ended up dropping the RDF. The spec. wasn’t very good and had several ambiguities.
Some people forged ahead with a cleaned up RDF-based version and called it RSS 1.0, while other people went ahead with the ambiguities but without RDF and called it RSS 2.0. The person publishing RSS 2.0 considered it finished and refused to update it. There was drama.
A bunch of people decided that there was too much to clean up from within that mess and started a new format, Atom. This ended up being a much better spec. with an official RFC, but at this point everybody was calling any type of feed “RSS”, even if it was Atom.
If you have the choice, you should pick Atom.
what is old is new again?
No, this is just old.
Pity though. RSS / Atom was a fantastic concept and it’s a real pity big tech killed them off.
Nothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.
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Lots of sites publish outages, incidents, downtime over RSS/atom. Works great for monitoring, post them into slack with a bot and you can start a discussion thread about that incident where you first hear about it.
Meh. Big tech didnt kill it off, it was already dead at that point. Sometimes things just arent popular no matter how much we might want it to be.
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