Finding An Atom 1.0 Feed Reader
Sunday 18th September 2005 - Saturday 24th September 2005
Categories: Internet, Opinion, FLOSS
Introduction
You may or may not be aware of Atom. For those of you in the latter group, Atom is essentially an alternative to RSS. If you don't know what RSS is, look here. Personally, I prefer using Atom since it isn't controlled by a company that can change the specification at a whim (RSS 2.0 was changed twice without the version being changed, meaning your RSS feed could have become invalid overnight without a single interaction from you). Rather, Atom is controlled by a standards body, giving it more stability. However, it isn't yet widely supported - which is what this article is about.
While writing a guide for writing an Atom 1.0 feed (don't hold your breath, it's taking a long time. There's a reason why the RSS guide was written first - it's easier!), I found that my test news reader, Straw, couldn't read my Atom feed. At all. (To be quite honest, I didn't try very hard - if you do get it working with an Atom feed, please send a message to me.) Mozilla Firefox could read the feed, but it only reads the title and the link - I wanted to check the many other details, such as the date and author, was working properly. And so began a long search...