Symphony.

Someone asked the question about the two specs on a different forum and I started doing a bit of research on the topic. What I found was that ATOM is pretty much the predecessor of RSS and provides a number of useful features RSS does not. Likewise, at this point both have the same level of support across feed readers including the big players like iTunes (podcasts) and Google Reader.

So… Unless I’m missing something ATOM is a better spec by default, yes? If that’s the case, shouldn’t Symphony default to ATOM instead of providing an RSS feed out of the box? It seems more in line with Symphony to me.

When you say defaults to, where do you mean? I haven’t got into creating a feed yet, but isn’t it something that you would set yourself in your xsl?

I must be missing something…

Oh, definitely, what I mean is that the default template provided is for RSS rather than ATOM. In that sense it advocates RSS over ATOM—yes, I’m aware I’m reading a bit into this—and I’m curious if there was a reason for that.

I’m not saying Symphony should default to ATOM in the starter site. I’m just wondering if RSS was chosen out of habit or because it was perceived as better (which it may be, I’m no expert).

I’m betting it was habit. The next default ensemble should provide both.

Awesome! Great… One more reason to want Symphony 3.0 to hit the RC stage.

Ahh, now I get you, you mean in the default ensemble…

I’ve not actually looked into it much to be honest…

I’ve always considered the differences so negligible (for basic blog posts at least) that I default to RSS. I don’t know if Atom is necessarily “better”, since they both do the same thing in slightly different ways. But it would be great for the default workspace to provide both, if only to educate developers of how to create either.

It seems more in line with Symphony to me

I’m interested to know why.

I’m interested to know why.

Not that this really matters for feed subscription in particular, but isn’t Atom extensible, e.g. gData is an extension of Atom?

To me Atom collections could be correlated to Symphony Sections (i’ll just throw that in my pile of ‘cool Symphony extensions to write some day’).

An old but thorough comparison: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

@czheng: That was actually the article I got most of my information from.

I’m interested to know why.

To me, Symphony is all about progressive standards and using simple yet highly flexible techniques to present content on the web. I just get the feeling that is more true of ATOM than RSS if only because ATOM is still going to be developed and improved where RSS is officially dead in the water.