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by mro_name 660 days ago
The "Why RSS" doesn't mention why instead of RFC4287 Atom.
3 comments
ericjmorey 660 days ago
Name recognition mostly, but you can just call an Atom feed an RSS feed and no one goes to jail for it, so just use the name that gets the results you care about.
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Rush2112 660 days ago
Hi thanks for this comment. I'll look into Atom a bit more for this tool. Heard a lot about it.
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EricE 660 days ago
It was first and thus more broadly supported?
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velcrovan 660 days ago
RSS came out in 1999, Atom in 2005. There's not a meaningful difference in support between the two at this point.
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Tagbert 660 days ago
But RSS gained wide acceptance in that early period. Atom came along later and never seemed to gain as much usage.

People still think of "RSS feeds" and "RSS readers" even if some of those are Atom or at least offer Atom as an option.

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velcrovan 659 days ago
It could still be true that more people publish RSS than Atom. But functionally 100% of readers have supported both for a long, long time now.
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mro_name 656 days ago
100% includes iTunes or Podcatchers in general where I hardly find documentation for but would be interested for (my) https://mro.name/radio-privatkopie/

Can you give me a pointer how to write the Atom podcast feed?

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velcrovan 652 days ago
Podcasting is kind of a special case, since Apple's guidelines mandate the use of RSS [1]. So if you're publishing a podcast and you want to get into the Apple Podcasts directory, you have to publish a RSS 2.0 feed (as well as meet all their other extra requirements).

If you don't care about the Apple Podcasts directory you can publish an Atom podcast feed that will work with most podcatchers. The primary thing you do differently from a normal Atom feed is to use the `link` element with `rel=enclosure` to reference the audio file for each episode/entry.

    <link rel="enclosure" href="http://example.com/audio.m4a" length="100" type="audio/mp4" />
I wrote Splitflap, the valid RSS/Atom feed generator package for Racket [2]. Not many folks use Racket but you might find the docs a good resource on this sort of thing anyway.

[1]: https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...

[2]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/splitflap/index.html

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