I was just looking at a *.wordpress.com blog, and noticed that there is no ATOM feed linked from it.

The more I work on stuff like feed-generation for the Mine, the more I reinforce my longstanding prejudice that it doesn’t really matter how data is encoded so long as the mechanism is fit for purpose; and where there is competition between two similar, the more … distant? bureaucratic? committee-bound? … format, will tend to lose.

ATOM is wonderfully documented, but (for instance) when I wanted to make Mine-feeds “iTunes-compliant” there was negligible information on what needed to be done with the ATOM that I was generating. Whilst iTunes-compliant RSS is verbosely documented by Apple, ATOM is not mentioned once on the page. The problem I was suffering was not due to ATOM, but it would have been comforting to find something from Apple telling me that ATOM support existed in iTunes.

Of course that Apple doesn’t document ATOM is not ATOM’s fault… but it does not lend confidence to my choice of feed-format. Django generates RSS2.0 by default, and I believe nothing would be currently lost by swapping from ATOM to RSS – though I have no actual driver to do so, yet. Everything that the Mine currently needs can be equally supported by both ATOM and RSS – the cleaner lines of the former are probably a better bet if we wanted to bend the feed specification to do mine-specific things… but to invent a magic mine-specific feed format (a-la Activity Streams) would be a barrier to adoption, so that won’t happen for a long time if at all.

But the observation still leaves me with a question: do I stick with ATOM and risk seeing it become a niche-format-for-geeks-but-with-lesser-client-support; or do I move to RSS and risk greater complexity for format extension in the future – extension which we may not do at all?