Genuine question for anyone that sees this: Is one of them better or does it depend on what you’re using it for?
Atom is always better. The one exception is podcasts, as Atom isn’t always supported. But for non-podcast feeds always do Atom.
The main benefit is that it removes ambiguities that cause client incompatibilities and mean your feed looks different to different users. Using Atom just removes the issues. There are no downsides.
I wrote about this here: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#formats
Reading your article as well as others’, what I can tell is that what makes Atom better/less ambigous is that unlike RSS 2.0, it defines each element far more consistently, and even enforces where RSS does not. It only takes one time format, post IDs are mandatory so readers can better tell the posts apart, fields are better scoped, things like relative links (like /index.html instead of example.com/index.html) and different formats as post body (like HTML vs. plain text) are better handled, etc.
So in short, it sounds like someone looked at how RSS handled things and thought “how can I improve it?”
Yes. Atom is very much a derivative of RSS. IIUC there was sort of a split between RSS v3 (which never really ended up landing) and Atom hence one had to pick a different name. If the world was a perfect place Atom probably would have been called RSS v3 and people would not be as confused. But at the time it probably wasn’t clear which spec would end up succeeding.
That’s great, thanks
