Yes, there will be an Atom IETF Working Group. No, there is no “standards war”.
IETF · I just heard that the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) has approved the creation of the “AtomPub Working Group” with a charter along the lines that have been posted for months. Note that the chairs, secretary, and editors of the WG have yet to be named, and I believe they’d like an IETF insider (which neither Sam nor I are) as co-chair. There’ll be an official announcement in the next day or two, and I’ll point to it when it shows up.
In effect, this means that the IESG is convinced that there’s good-enough consensus in the Atom community in favor of working with the IETF. I think they’re right, and (with thanks to the W3C for their hospitable offer) I would like to put this discussion behind us and start on issues lists and draft revisions and all the other real work.
I’ve never been through the IETF process, but hang around here at ongoing and you’ll hear all about it.
Standards-War Stupidity · Now here is some seriously vapid reporting. The writers have this moronic journo training that stories that involve conflict are exciting (“if it bleeds, it leads”) and so they’re looking for one here. This kind of thing decreases the chances of my re-subscribing to CNet.
There is no meaningful technical conflict between RSS and Atom. RSS is widely deployed and is not going away any time soon.
Atom is already supported by most of the interesting software, and already has pretty good deployment considering it’s only at version 0.3, and once it’s nailed down and supported by a few popular libraries, it’ll get used more.
I’m pretty sure that for business-oriented applications of syndication—and there’s going to be lots of them—Atom will be a more compelling choice; tighter spec, SOAP-friendly, and so on.
And I’m close to 100% confident that the Atom Publishing Protocol (API) will get very popular very fast. As in, I bet that most cellphones you can buy in 2006 will have it, so you can snap a picture and it’ll be on your blog, regardless of who’s hosting it. The protocol has taken to heart all the lessons of the last few years of practice and is going to be easy to implement and secure and efficient; what’s not to like?
Yeah, there are flamers on all sides in the syndication discourse, but let’s just assume they’re childish idiots who can be safely ignored. At the start of the Atom community meeting the other day, in my opening remarks I said we were not going to tolerate any childish ad-hominem bullshit in this process, and we didn’t have any all day that day, and to the extent that I have any influence over it, we won’t have any more.
