Format model

Popularity

Standardization

Format model

Internationalization

Atomlib

RFC 4287

RSS 2.0 specification copyright belongs to the Harvard University and the project is frozen. Though the specification is under a Creative Commons License, no major modification can be done in it. Dave Winer, one of the main RSS developers, asked developers to join forces and to develop a single format, which would be compatible both with RSS and Atom, in order to merge these competitive standards into one unit.

Atom is an open IETF standard, which is constantly being developed and improved.

Required content

RSS 2.0 requires availability of title, link and description on the channel (metadata) level, and does not require that any of the fields of individual items in a RSS channel be present.

Atom 1.0 requires that RSS channel and entries included titles (which can be empty), a unique identifier and time stamps of the last update.

Types of content

RSS 2.0 channel can contain only text or hypertext (HTML-escaped tags are shielded by CDATA) information without possibility to indicate what assignment is used. Shielded HTML (for example, AT&T will be represented as AT&amp;T) adds more complexities for developers. Titles content model (<title>) undefined. Titles with angle brackets or ampersands will be interpreted by significant number of reader programs without regard to representation.

Representation of data and time

For representation of data and time Atom uses an international standard, specified by RFC 3339 (from ISO 8601 subset)