Atom 1.0 Support

Published on by Nick Bradbury

Now that Atom 1.0 is baked and ready to serve, it seems due time to talk about when NewsGator plans to support it in our aggregators. In a nutshell, we’ll be supporting Atom 1.0 as soon as possible in all our products. Here’s our timeline for Atom 1.0 support:

  • FeedDemon: next week, with the release of FeedDemon 1.6 Beta 2
  • NewsGator Online: within about a month
  • NewsGator Outlook edition: in the next release
  • NewsGator Enterprise Server for v1

BTW, the fact that NewsGator Online will support Atom 1.0 soon means that any product that synchronizes with NewsGator Online will automatically support Atom 1.0. Nice :)

9 thoughts on “Atom 1.0 Support”

  1. Nick,
    I noticed there was some controversy in the blogosphere given the statement from the folks behind the Atom spec to move away/discontinue support for the 0.3 spec.
    I know Scoble mentioned that the RSS support coming in Longhorn/Vista would continue to support Atom 0.3.
    Personally, I do not see how they can completely encourage the movement away from Atom 0.3 given how far and wide it has been implemented.
    http://intertwingly.net/blog/2005/07/19/Atom-0-3-Denouement/
    Just curious,
    Jason

  2. just curious – what’s the difference between RSS, Atom, and XML feeds?
    I notice on a bunch of sites I can choose between an Atom feed or and index.rdf feed – which one is better? Why? What’s the difference?
    Thanks

  3. Jim, you probably don’t have to worry about the difference – either feed will have the same content, so you won’t notice any difference between the two feeds.
    FWIW, I *really* wish people would stop publishing multiple feeds with the same content. It just causes confusion, and slows down the process of getting people subscribed.

  4. Jason, I also thought the “Atom 0.3 denouement” was odd, given that there’s no way to force people to update their feeds. Aggregators like FeedDemon will need to support Atom 0.3 for a long time.

  5. Jim: In general, those RSS, Atom, and XML icons mean the same thing: “the file behind this button contains a feed of data from this site.”
    (NOTE: “RSS” and “Atom” are actually forms of “XML”, in much the same way that “paperback” and “hardback” are forms of “books”.)
    There *are* differences between the formats, in terms of the kinds of metadata you’ll usually find in each… but for 90% of Just Plain Users, the differences are virtually invisible. Pick one and don’t worry about it.

  7. Thanks for letting me know about this, Dwight! No – beta 2 hasn’t been released yet. Somehow BetaNews discovered a beta 2 download on my site which I only made available to a few testers. It’s definitely incomplete, and shouldn’t be installed.
    I’ve removed the link from my site so BetaNews will 404 on the download.

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