[ andrewho dot co dot uk ]

Atom feed 2006-12-28 at 22:23

I’ve just finished svn-commit-ing the code for an Atom feed, which is available via the link on the right (there’s also the standard <link>). I was originally hesitant to go with Atom due to uncertainty as to how widely the flavour was supported, but it has been noted that as of June this year, most of the major aggregators (NetNewsWire, Bloglines et al) support it.

It was actually surprisingly easy to implement, as the Atom specs (RFC 4287) are as rigorous as I would both like and expect. For example, RSS 2.0 can contain either plain text or escaped HTML, with no way to specify which is being provided. One therefore risks having such eyesores as

a bit of this &amp;amp; that

being displayed to the user. Atom 1.0, on the other hand, allows one to specify (using the type attribute) whether what is being provided is plain text, escaped HTML, or well-formed XHTML.