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.