alt.hn

5/3/2026 at 10:08:47 PM

Introduction to Atom

 https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/atom.html

by susam

5/4/2026 at 4:52:29 AM

At this point, developers have named so many projects "Atom" that there are officially more Atoms in the world than there are atoms in the universe.

by rippeltippel

5/4/2026 at 1:54:44 PM

To be fair, Atom the XML Feed, similar to RSS (linked here) is probably the oldest one. It's from 2005.

Now why a spec from 2005 is in the front page of hacker news, I have no idea...

by eloisant

5/4/2026 at 4:53:39 AM

This one is (was) pretty important.

The hyperscalers stopped that timeline from winning, though.

by echelon

5/4/2026 at 7:24:06 AM

How is this the hyperscalers fault?

YouTube had atom feeds and I don't think Amazon and Microsoft have relevant syndication.

Meta is surely responsible but that's it, imo.

by riffraff

5/4/2026 at 7:54:43 AM

YouTube still does

    <feed xmlns:yt="http://www.youtube.com/xml/schemas/2015" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
I don't think they are linked to anywhere but the url is http://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel_id>

by erk__

5/4/2026 at 12:42:03 PM

GitHub too for their releases; you just add /atom to get the feed, which works great.

by kmfrk

5/4/2026 at 7:29:56 AM

Google on several occasions took moves to make the web less semantic.

They dumped microformats and standards in favor of soupy error tolerant formats that benefitted their search engine and made it harder for other efforts to make information shareable and accessible.

They wanted it to be easy to get information in, but for you to have to go through them to get information out.

by echelon

5/4/2026 at 2:03:29 PM

> They dumped microformats and standards

I'm not sure they killed microformats, they still support hReview, hProduct etc, don't they?

And they pushed schema.org. I wrote a trivial recipe importing tool that just works™ on a bunch of website because it uses the JSON-LD Recipe schema. It's ~100 lines and a ton simpler than what I had to write 15 years ago.

Sure, they pushed for HTML5-style stuff, but that's not much of killing things.

IMO it's not google that stopped microformats: it's that website owners realized most of the time it was advantaging third parties for no advantage to them.

by riffraff

5/4/2026 at 6:19:06 AM

It was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.

by eterevsky

5/4/2026 at 8:41:06 AM

I thought it did in fact catch on but most people still referred to it as "RSS".

by ravenstine

5/4/2026 at 1:57:14 PM

It did catch on, pretty much everything that supported RSS also supported Atom.

It's just that they both fell out of fashion when social media decided they prefer to keep their users captive than accepting interop.

by eloisant

5/4/2026 at 7:34:46 AM

I think it caught on well enough, platforms such as Wordpress still support it out of the box (I just checked my blog, it works).

I liked Atom's clean design but it felt it was mostly pushed by Google (I may be misremembering) and in the end the syndicated web faded into obscurity anyway.

by riffraff

5/4/2026 at 7:14:04 AM

IIRC RSS 2.0 included most of what Atom has, no?

by brabel

5/4/2026 at 10:46:24 AM

Not really, and it's still more error-prone than Atom.

There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.

by talideon

5/3/2026 at 11:18:24 PM

I hand-rolled an atom feed for my statically generated blog. It’s a reasonable, easy format to work with.

by mplanchard

5/4/2026 at 4:52:54 AM

IIRC, Aaron Swartz was one of the contributors to the format. RIP.

by echelon

5/4/2026 at 3:08:16 AM

Well, that’s a blast from the past.

by drob518

5/3/2026 at 11:28:13 PM

First iteration of Google's APIs were atom. I do miss XML.

by intrasight

5/4/2026 at 2:16:09 AM

One of the API providers I use at work returns responses in XML and we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect.

What do you like about XML? I feel like I'm missing something.

by abustamam

5/4/2026 at 5:17:06 AM

The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation.

Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.

by deaddodo

5/4/2026 at 6:51:30 AM

JSON is structured (not plain text to be analyzed by an IA). JSON has JSON Schema.

In addition, JSON is easier to parse and to map to common data structures of programming languages.

by dolmen

5/4/2026 at 12:55:38 PM

JSON Schema is an unofficial spec with a bunch of competitors and multiple versions, not all of which are compatible. I don't think you can compare it to XML schema validation.

I'm also not so sure about JSON being easier to map to common data structures. The lack of order guarantees within objects makes things like ordered maps quite annoying (you need to either use an array of entries with key and value, or an index within the mapped objects).

by jeroenhd

5/4/2026 at 12:21:27 PM

Thanks, that's interesting to know. Given that we have json schema now though, what reason would someone use XML over Json now?

by abustamam

5/4/2026 at 6:53:54 AM

XLM had DTDs and Schemas 20 years ago.

JSON is still figuring it out.

by theshrike79

5/4/2026 at 12:27:10 PM

If XML+DTD was so great, it would still be used.

by thiht

5/4/2026 at 12:19:23 PM

Json has json schema. What are DTDs?

by abustamam

5/4/2026 at 12:43:42 PM

JSON Schema has existed for maybe 6 years in theory, in practice a few years.

As for DTD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_definition

Basically it tells the system what elements are allowed in which places and what attributes they can contain.

    <!ELEMENT html (head, body)>
Defines a html element that can contain a head and body, nothing else. Anything extra or missing will fail the validator.

It was kinda-sorta eventually superseded by XML Schema that could also define what KIND of data the attributes could contain, but did exist at the top of XML/HTML/SGML documents for years.

by theshrike79

5/4/2026 at 3:46:35 AM

I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.

In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.

> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect

I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?

by refulgentis

5/4/2026 at 4:59:53 AM

> useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase

Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for?

> I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON?

I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.

by abustamam

5/4/2026 at 12:59:58 PM

> I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML

I hear this too, but often when I ask why people say things like that, it's either because XML is "outdated" or because they don't like it.

It's like programs written in C or C++: very few large projects chose those languages nowadays, often for good reasons, so the projects written in those languages are usually 10 to 20 years old. Age comes with a lot of legacy cruft and obscure behaviour, but that's not the fault of those languages per se. Or for people blasting banks for using COBOL, even though COBOL is a perfectly fine high-performance language for the niches bank mainframes serve.

by jeroenhd

5/3/2026 at 11:10:16 PM

what is old is new again?

by perrohunter

5/3/2026 at 11:51:12 PM

No, this is just old.

Pity though. RSS / Atom was a fantastic concept and it’s a real pity big tech killed them off.

by hnlmorg

5/4/2026 at 12:13:15 AM

Nothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.

by rambambram

5/4/2026 at 12:33:18 AM

Agreed. That nowadays people or even big companies find it outside their core competency to host their blog, have atom/RSS feeds is not because big tech killing it.

by geodel

5/4/2026 at 8:40:07 AM

How do you curate and keep on top of so many feeds? I have ~10 on my RSS reader and I sometimes have trouble keeping up if I have a couple of busy days

by darreninthenet

5/4/2026 at 9:03:13 AM

Good question! I don't follow all the news and updates from each and every feed. At the bottom of this page you can see the UI: https://www.heyhomepage.com/?link=32&title=Screenshots

Basically, I get to see the latest post from a random feed. Nothing else. No lists of unread new posts from all the feeds. If I like the title and short summary, I click through to the website or blog itself where I can read the whole thing. There's no FOMO this way, or an information overload. Just one post a time.

Because the whole list of feeds is curated by myself, I know that everything is at least a little interesting. I even made a category with Youtube channels that I like, so I can skip their annoying recommended videos algo.

Next to this basic functionality, I made what I call 'Newspapers'. These are certain topics with a bunch of selected feeds attached, they get checked automatically in the background. When the Newspaper has enough articles, I see a new Newspaper appear. Otherwise it might take months before a feed is shown in the random selection.

by rambambram

5/4/2026 at 4:49:01 AM

Is there any platform for sharing what feeds we follow? Would love to discover some new blogs.

by holistio

5/4/2026 at 8:14:02 AM

Well, my guess is that OPML is underrated. And I understand that, because it's so different from the social media that we are used to. On my homepage (link in bio) you can find all the feeds that I follow, available as an OPML file. It might be of interest to you, it might not (probably a lot of blogs you know from here, at least half of my 2000 feeds).

One 'dream' of me is to have OPML be the discovery-glue between all kinds of individual personal websites and blogs. But this requires critical mass to have enough to discover and explore, and it needs some fun/interesting software way to do that.

by rambambram

5/4/2026 at 4:14:23 AM

[dead]

by ushimitsudoki

5/4/2026 at 6:49:33 AM

Lots of sites publish outages, incidents, downtime over RSS/atom. Works great for monitoring, post them into slack with a bot and you can start a discussion thread about that incident where you first hear about it.

by pletnes

5/4/2026 at 2:52:36 AM

Meh. Big tech didnt kill it off, it was already dead at that point. Sometimes things just arent popular no matter how much we might want it to be.

by bawolff

5/4/2026 at 3:35:34 AM

Google Reader was uber popular at a time, then Google decided that syndication of articles, with comments, had to be an exclusive feature of their Facebook-esque Google+.

by lolive

5/3/2026 at 11:35:10 PM

I’m not clear on the difference between atom and RSS. Atom seemed to be the better spec, but for my Astro blog I ended up sticking to the built in `rss` helper it ships with.

by tkcranny

5/4/2026 at 11:57:56 AM

I also didn't know much of the difference between the two, and I also used RSS for my Hugo site.

At the bottom of the article there's, under "See Also", a link to this page comparing RSS and Atom: https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared...

It seems like the last update is from 2008, but the section on the differences has a few interesting items. I am not sure if it changed, but it says:

"The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made (although the specification is under a Creative Commons licence) and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work."

The Wikipedia RSS page has also a small section comparing RSS and Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom

"Technically, Atom has several advantages: less restrictive licensing, IANA-registered MIME type, XML namespace, URI support, RELAX NG support.[35]"

by kinow

5/4/2026 at 10:39:46 AM

In the beginning was RSS 0.x. It was originally intended to be based on RDF. Compromises were made and it ended up dropping the RDF. The spec. wasn’t very good and had several ambiguities.

Some people forged ahead with a cleaned up RDF-based version and called it RSS 1.0, while other people went ahead with the ambiguities but without RDF and called it RSS 2.0. The person publishing RSS 2.0 considered it finished and refused to update it. There was drama.

A bunch of people decided that there was too much to clean up from within that mess and started a new format, Atom. This ended up being a much better spec. with an official RFC, but at this point everybody was calling any type of feed “RSS”, even if it was Atom.

If you have the choice, you should pick Atom.

by JimDabell

5/4/2026 at 12:20:40 PM

Same here. Astro has @astrojs/rss package but not atom. It should be an atom option in the same package or needed an @astrojs/atom package.

There is an npm package called astrojs-atom but i am not use it is official or safe.

Is there any astro core developer reading this, please add atom option addition to rss.

by gabazing

5/4/2026 at 12:40:33 PM

So many words to choose and they had to choose one that already has been used before. Why are techies so devoid of imagination?

by bossyTeacher

5/4/2026 at 1:58:05 PM

What software used "Atom" before 2005?

by eloisant

5/4/2026 at 12:48:32 PM

It's from more than 2 decades ago.

by jasonlotito