I posted a few days ago, Winer Proposes a Merger of RSS and Atom , about Dave Winer's suggestion for a merger of RSS 2.0 and Atom.
To cut a long story short the conclusion I have come to is that the offer is of pretty low relevance.
I don't think I would go quite as far as Dare Obasanjo, On Merging RSS and Atom , who wrote, "It takes a bad idea (coming up with a redundant XML syndication format that is incompatible with existing ones) and merges it with a worse idea (have all these people who dislike Dave Winer have to work with him).".
So why do I think a merger of RSS 2.0 and Atom is of low relevance?
First, parsing information feeds isn't a huge deal for those who write aggregators, despite hickups like the one which Tim Bray recently caused, <�s Pointy End , about an earlier Ongoing post, </TAG> . As you can possibly imagine the angled brackets in post titles caused interesting repercussions further down the information feed ... or should I say food? ... chain.
Whatever the result of any suggested RSS 2.0 / Atom merger the "RSSAtom" format or whatever the hybrid might be called would add yet another language to the information feed mix. At this stage in the development of information feeds I don't think we need yet another one. A couple of years down the line when we have a better understanding of what is valuable in information feeds (and metadata more generally) a new language might make a lot of sense.
There are far deeper and more important issues in the short term which information aggregators need to solve as we move into the era of the InFlowWeb .
For example, how do we express decisions about what information we want to store? Making decisions on a simple dichotomy of a certain specified number of days (which tends to vary by aggregator) and for ever, doesn't seem to provide anything but the crudest measure of control.
How do we get secure information feeds from a range of sources?
How do we store and efficiently retrieve non-current information that we choose to keep? Should information aggregators have their own backend database? Perhaps the Longhorn WinFS is attempting to fulfil that role ... or it will when Windows 2020 makes its appearance.
Apart from the obvious (rapidly growing) raft of news aggregators other tools such as Microsoft's OneNote and OnFolio are among many products which provide ways to store information from sources on the Web. These tools have different combinations of simplicity, ease of use, flexibility, customisability and functionalities which are typical in an area where our thinking is not (yet) clear.
I guess we are going to go through a period of rapidly evolving information feed/management tools and in time we will get to the point where certain tools survive because they do the job better.
In the meantime, most information aggregators will get along just fine coping with feeds from various versions of RSS and Atom ... just so long as Tim Bray doesn't resign from the W3C's TAG too often.
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 18, 2004 07:28 PM