RSS vs. Atom
For the most part, this website tends to use the “RSS” nomenclature to refer to feeds, but you will also see the term “Atom” used as well. Okay, so… what’s the deal here?
I’ll be completely straight with you—I’m not the most tech-savvy guy around. If you’re reading this, you might not be either. So I’m going to cut the B.S. and get this out of the way up front: for small web hobbyists like us, RSS and Atom are two different ways to do basically the same thing, and there is little benefit to choosing one over the other.
For a little more, intentionally-vague history: created in the late 90s, RSS is the original standard for providing content via feed. People liked it, it became synonymous with the technology, that’s why it’s the more commonly-used name. It could have ended there.
But in the early 2000s, it was obvious RSS wasn’t going to be updated anymore, and a bunch of nerds still had some issues with it. We’re not talking regular you-and-me nerds, we’re talking write-our-own-XML-based-specifications nerds. The issues themselves were the kinds of technical things that wouldn’t really matter much to the layperson, but mattered terribly much to the type of individual who was really invested in this sort of thing. And so, by the mid-00s, Atom was released. We’ve kept both around for the 20 years since.
So where are we at today? While Atom is—technically speaking—the latest and greatest in feed technology, RSS is still widely used, to the point that most reader applications seamlessly support both. From a subscriber’s perspective, whether a site provides an RSS or an Atom feed makes little difference. All they need is the URL and they’re good to go.
If you’re a site creator looking to offer a feed for the first time, both will work fine; pick whichever calls to you. Personally, my own feed is RSS; but this is only because when I first started it I didn’t have a good understanding of what Atom was, and I refused to learn anything about it—because, honestly, the name is kind of dumb. Had I known then what I know now… sure, I’d probably have set up with Atom instead, since it is the most “up-to-date” iteration of the technology.
That said, I don’t feel pressured to switch. RSS is also fine for most purposes and has been serving me perfectly well so far.
…I imagine, however, that some of you may have visited this article because you expected me to tell you which to use, and now you’re disappointed because I was all wishy-washy about it and didn’t actually give you any direction. That’s fair. So if you need somebody to make the decision for you, here it is: use Atom so you can get started with sorbier’s excellent guide.