Folks,
This FYI.
In the most recent Readers/Commenters post, I responded to a comment saying, "turn on the RSS, please."
I said I'm a tech dummy (BTW - How do radio waves get into our homes when all the doors and windows are shut?) but said a friend would get the RSS turned on.
Friend researched and responded this morning.
Ok, I did some research between calls and Blogger uses a standard called "Atom" which is, apparently, the losing standard. Think Betamax or Diesel engines for cars.I'll keep you posted.
There is a way to change it to RSS but it involves putting special blogger code into your template. Which I am reluctant to do, for obvious reasons.
I will try a few things that are non-destructive and see what I can figure out.
We may need to wrap this into your long-delayed site redesign. Take a look at www.find-the-boots.com and see what you think of the design.
John
2 comments:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home
"...If we detect a user-agent that does not support Atom feeds, and a publisher's source feed is Atom, SmartFeed will convert the feed on the fly to RSS so that the client can still display the feed."
Atom isn't a losing standard, it's just a newer one. Blogspot is just late in supporting Atom 1.0, and is instead clinging to the deprecated Atom 0.3. This should be changing very soon, since 0.3 really shouldn't be used any more.
Atom 1.0, on the other hand, is supported by nearly every news reader on the planet, and has become the foundation of a number of new significant initiatives including Google's GDATA specification. Google and IBM are huge backers of Atom, and Microsoft is supporting it in Vista, Max, and IE7 out of the box.
As an IETF standard, Atom 1.0 also has the official backing of an internationally-recognized standards body.
Atom is more complex than RSS, but it is also more precise. The former means it will be slower to gain in popularity than RSS, the latter means it has the potential to be used in more exacting applications than RSS can be.
Furthermore, the RSS spec has been frozen, so it cannot be directly improved to fit new technology requirements. Improvements must be added through 3rd party extensions which have a difficult path of adoption by mainstream publishers/readers.
The Atom specification can be directly improved in future versions, so there are potentially less obstacles in the future.
The Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) is an important new addition that is changing the face of blogging tools, including the next gen of Blogger. Keep an eye open for it in tech news.
This said, everything above is about potential, not reality. The current state of affairs is that RSS has a much larger market share, and will for some time. Still, saying Atom is a "losing" standard is looking at where the runners are now, not where they'll be at the end of the race. This may be a case of the rabbit and the hare.
Post a Comment