Blogging Roller

Dare Obasanjo posted some criticism of the Atom Format and Protocol today, based on Ben Hammersley's talk at E-Tech. I'm not at the conference; I picked up on them from James Robertson, who also shares a rather cynical view of Atom. Dare's a smart guy and I really wish he was participating in the Atom Format and Protocol discussions, but he dropped out and seems to have lost touch with Atom. Even a dumb guy like me can see that. So, I'll try to correct some of his (and James') misconceptions about Atom.

Dare Obasanjo: During the break, Marc Canter and I talked about the fact that both the Atom syndication format and Atom publishing protocol are simply not rich enough to support existing blogging tools let alone future advances in blogging technologies. For example, in MSN Spaces we already have data types such as music lists and photo albums which don't fit in the traditional blog entry syndication paradigm that Atom is based upon. More importantly it is unclear how one would even extend to do this in an acceptable way.

I'm not sure I understand what the specific problem is here, but if there is a problem then that problem is shared by all of the nine ten incompatible forms of RSS as well. They all use essentially the same model and offer the same mechanisms for extensibility (allowing the addition of new elements at feed or entry level). Atom is not supposed to be a new invention, it is a rigorously specified standardization of existing technologies -- carefully designed to ensure inter-op.

Dare Obasanjo: Similar issues exist with the API. The API already has less functionality existing APIs such as the MetaWeblog API. It is unclear how one would perform the basic act of querying one's blog for a list of categories to populate the drop down list used by a rich client which is a commonly used feature by such tools.

Atom's support for categories is unclear, of course, because that section of the specification has not been written yet. When Atom Protocol is complete, it will offer more, not less, functionality than the MetaWeblog API. Contrast that with the MetaWeblog API, where the spec is "complete" yet categories are still unclear.

James Robertson: Sounds like events moved past the Atom API while it was being put together. Podcasting walked right past it. Their idea seems to be that you should just slap Base64 encoded content into the feed - uh huh - I sure want to download a 10MB screencast (more like 15 after being encoded, but never mind) each time I look at the feed. Looks like the Atom API is worth ignoring as something to actually use...

No, that is not the Atom Protocol solution for Podcasting. To reference a Podcast from an Atom entry, you'd use the Atom Link element.

Come on back guys. Read the latest drafts and get back into the process. We need you and we all need Atom.