Atom vs. RSS Adoption
Both RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, and Atom are programs that allow you to create news feeds, pulling content from frequently updated websites and blogs and aggregating it into a single area, or reader, for you to view at once. You simply subscribe to the feed offered by a website. After you enter the feed’s URI, or Uniform Resource Identifier -- its Web address -- into the program, you can view the constantly updated content culled from these subscribed sites.
Other People Are Reading
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Feeds
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Both RSS and Atom function in the same basic way. Publishers of websites create a standardized XML, or Extensible Markup Language, file, that contains information about where new content is published on the site. The XML encoding makes the content readable by a range of software programs and platforms and is stored in a specific location, at the URI. The file at the URI can then be downloaded by either the RSS or Atom reader for viewing by the user. These readers have become very popular, as they create a single place where content from multiple websites can be seen at once without visiting each individual website.
Differences
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RSS and Atom differ slightly in the types of feeds they can handle and how they deliver the feeds into their readers. RSS entries may contain either plain text or HTML; RSS doesn't differentiate between the two. Atom readers can handle text and HTML, as well as XML, binary files and references to multimedia files, and differentiates between each file type. RSS also only allows for certain information to be displayed in the reader, most notably a time stamp, title and link to the full content. Atom readers are more robust, and the display fields can be customized to include features as an indicator that the content has been updated or metadata for sorting content.
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RSS Popularity
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Although Atom has definite flexibility and display features that tower over RSS, RSS is the more commonly deployed of the two readers. Developers at AtomEnabled speculate that this lag in adoption may be affected by the fact that a number of major websites, such as The New York Times, adopted RSS before Atom’s development and haven't invested in migrating their feeds to an Atom-based program.
BitTorrent
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Although it's a different type of service than a feed reader, BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, is preferred by some Internet users for aggregating their Web content over either RSS or Atom. Clients, rather than readers, receive files, which are downloaded either from a website or from another user. BitTorrent can render and display many more file types than RSS and Atom; it can handle XML feeds as well as nearly every type of file extension that delineates text, images, audio and video files.
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