[Discuss] RSS or Atom

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-03-01 16:34-0800 pw wrote:

> I think it was Alan Irwin that was writing about
> RSS vs Atom feeds.
>
> What was the upshot of that. Is Atom the standard
> to adhere to or is RSS?

We switched over to atom 1.0 for both of Barbara's feeds
(http://loll.sourceforge.net/linux/links/loll.atom and
http://loll.sourceforge.net/linux/links/highlights.atom).

What set this all in motion was that netscape destroyed the essential
reference for their version of RSS so the old RSS version of Barbara's feeds
would no longer verify.  When I looked at the large number of other RSS 
"standards", it turned out they tended to be pushed by just one individual
or company (as in the netscape version).  atom 1.0 is actually a formal
standard proposed by a widely based industry group (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)), and we are happy we switched.

There was a neat spin-off from the increased exposure to xml that we got
from this atom experience. Barbara is helping out the KDE project by
collecting and verifying data (URL, date, etc.) for meetings that are of
interest to KDE developers and users. She reads most of the Linux literature
in any case because of her above work on Loads of Linux Linux and Linux News
Highlights of the Week so it is only a small step further to collect data on
meetings. The project also employs her librarian skills to verify and
annotate the meetings data. The data she had collected were in ascii format
to start, but I recently converted them to xml with a Relax NG Compact (RNC)
schema determined (mostly) by the extraordinarily useful trang application.
The xml format with RNC schema allows Barbara to validate her input (using
the rnv application), and also transform it to other forms (using xslt) such
as standards-compliant webpages with various useful orderings of the
meetings. It's been a good experience to start harnessing the potential of
xml for a personal project like this one.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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