What is the difference between atom and rss feeds

Aaron Brazell is the author of Technosailor. Last month, I wrote an article here at ProBlogger in The Blogging for Beginners series introducing the concept of feeds. Today I want to take the discussion of syndication a step farther and look at the two main types of feeds used in blogging today — Atom and RSS. Mark Pilgrim counted 9 different flavors of RSS and there are 2 different variants on the Atom specification.

Really, there is much to say about the various formats. There are certainly people more qualified to deal with feeds. RSS 2. Much of that has to do with the defacto use of it by WordPress, but it is also the one variety of RSS format that seems to have solved some of the problems presented by earlier versions. Of the two feed types, RSS is most widley used but also has signifigant downfalls. This is very bad when it comes to using RSS-syndicated content elsewhere.

RSS has only three required fields on a per item basis- title, link and description. Atom 1. For instance, where RSS requires descriptive fields such as title and link only in item breakdowns, Atom requires these things for both items and the full feed.

Trust me when I say I find this useful. A cool feature of Atom has to do with autodiscovery. Podcasting was also derived from the RSS format when it added enclosure support in the 2.

Most web sites, though not all, that offer web syndication only offers it in the RSS format, hampering the further advancement of the ATOM format. Supporters of the ATOM format also needs to add support for RSS so that those who only have RSS support can also see the content, which is still the great majority of people who subscribe to web feeds. Summary: 1. RSS still holds dominance in the syndication format due to its head start and popularity.

Cite APA 7 , l. Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects. MLA 8 , lanceben. Name required. Email required. The feed work in similar to RSS feeds and can be read using readers. Atom 1. Atom is based on a new IETF standard that was published in Though RSS and Atom perform the same duty, they differ from each other in many ways.

Another feature that Atom has been praised for would be date format. Atom shows the date timestamp on the document listing the date that website was last updated, while RSS shows the timestamp of the date and time when the feed was updated.

Unlike RSS, Atom also allows extensions to its namespaces. However, RSS is still the most popular web feed standard used because of its early launch and capture of the market. Real Simple Syndication RSS is a family of web feeds formats that are used to publish frequently updated works. Atom uses the standard xml:lang attribute. Difference between RSS and Atom. Content model RSS 2. Date formats RSS shows the date timestamps of data when the feed was created and last updated.

Atom shows the date timestamp when the website was last updated.