Atom isn’t RSS!!

For the last time: Atom isn’t some new version of RSS! It’s not a different kind of RSS and it’s not some alternative-form of RSS either! Atom is one RDF-compliant standard, RSS is another. They have absoloutely nothing to do with one another, and they’re not compatible! You can’t mix and match the two, and pretending they’re one and the same only makes things worse for you and your readers. Nor is it a “sub-format” of RSS. Just because the both serve the same basic purpose at-heart, it doesn’t mean you can say they’re one and the same – that’s like saying OS X is another format of Windows!

What makes it extra-embarassing is when a blogging engine, attempting to sell itself to the more “technically advanced” bloggers out there, has this as a “selling point:”

RSS Syndication

With RSS, your content can be made available for syndication.  ExpressionEngine supports all major RSS formats, including the new Atom format.

Umm.. Hello? So much for “redefining the standard for publishing systems.” Somehow we don’t think that’s what pMachine had in mind when they made that tagline up for ExpressionEngine, their new up-and-coming blogging platform.

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  • 6 thoughts on “Atom isn’t RSS!!

    1. And your comments are broken since they don’t take the “less than” character. Oh well.

    2. Hey Warzone..

      That’s a glitch we’re working on – and as for the < character, you must be using the WYSIWYG editor (currently doesn’t work with Safari) or else use HTML-encoded characters as with all other WordPress blogs.

    3. Why, pray tell, did you delete the comment from one of the ExpressionEngine dev’s?

      By the way, you really need to research before you post.  EE is going on 3 years old if memory serves.  Hardly “up-and-coming” but rather quite well established and respected to boot. 

      Thanks for the laugh, all the same…

    4. Hello Tieman,

      I have no idea who “YawningMan” is/was, I just saw comment spam, and so deleted it. For the record, (since we don’t censor anything except outright flames without value or content or argument & outright spam) the comment was “Yawn” – Not even a fragment of a sentence.

      EE is going on 3 years, but as far as the usershare goes, it is up-and-coming, like it or not. That doesn’t mean anything as far as quality, customer care, reliability, speed, or performance go – but the comments and responses we’re getting here most certainly do give us impressions..

      I’m impressed with the speed of your update (thanks for the heads-up, Omar), but at the same time, that doesn’t mean you have to laugh and pretend it’s a stupid thing to point out – mistakes happen, denying that is just stupid.

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