There's a whole bunch of noise on the metablogs (that is, the blogs that are about blogging! rawr!) about Atom versus RSS, and which technology will be The Winner in the Standards War, and surprisingly enough almost everything I have to say on the topic has already been said in the Slashdot comment thread. I know, strange isn't it, a /. thread that it's full of idiots.
The one thing I think the Atom guys did wrong was not trying to call their format RSS as well. Really, guys -- RSS has the mindshare (such as it is); there was no need to invent an entirely new name for what's actually the same thing. I read an interview with the creator of Ethernet about a year ago, and he said something really telling -- I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially it was that Ethernet was popular enough that whatever replaces it is probably also going to be called Ethernet. It's all about the ergonomics, people! fewer new things to learn is better.
1 comment:
In this case, it was probably a good idea to pick a different name since nobody agrees on what RSS stands for. I still think Atom was a poor choice, though. Doesn't exactly remind you of web feeds, does it?
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