The Butt Ugly Weblog

They said it couldn't be done...

...but the Atom feed format is now an official IETF Standards Track RFC. Congrats to everyone!

What does it mean? It means that now there is an properly specified, standardized way of doing feeds for news, podcasts, blogs, and a whole lot of other content. It does roughly the same things as RSS, but it's a bit more well-rounded for a lot of stuff. Since the same extensions work for them both, I don't feel there's going to be a lot of competition between these two, except for artificial competition created by people who have a dependencies on either format. Atom is relatively easy to generate, and most user's couldn't care less - they just subscribe to whatever feed they might find.

Atom is one of those things that will now just slowly grow in the woodworks, and only geeks will care, while everyone else will label it as "who cares". But it will be an integral part of the future infrastructure of the internet. It's much like say, TCP/IP, which grew quietly, and is now inside almost every sufficiently complex device.