Syndicated Progress
Earlier this week two significant announcements were made in regards to feeds and RESTful web services. These issues have been of my utmost interest for years given my MT plugin work.
The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) completed the final step in becoming an official standard of the IETF with the assignment of RFC 5023.
While I’ve maintain that feeds are simple web services for some time, AtomPub goes much further building of the the Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and REST principles to create a full web services protocol. The culmination of this work delivers a well defined and more extensible alternative to the Blogger API and its offshoots for publishing blogs and other forms of content.
Congratulations to the Atom Working Group on a job well done.
In other news, the RSS Advisory Board announced that it has endorsed published an RSS Profile that provides various clarifications and best practices to the use of the format. While not a specification or subject to the rigors of a standardization body like Atom, the profile provides a lot of good and welcome advice albeit it a a few years late.
Kudos to the group for having the wherewithal to see this process through this far in what has always been a thorny, thankless and hostile space.
One interesting recommendation in the RSS Profile that I was surprised to see was the recommended use of an atom:link tag to identify a feed’s own URL. It’s a good and useful idea granted. Given the intense acrimony of the past, it seems almost as blasphemous as a Boston Red Sox going to the New York Yankees. Oh wait a second…
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