Atom Vs. RSS for Email
With feeds, you can post website updates to Twitter or Facebook and even send your visitors email messages every time you post to your website or blog. Providing Atom, RSS and email subscription options enable all your visitors to receive updates via feed readers or with their normal email programs, respectively.
Other People Are Reading
-
Atom, RSS and Email
-
Atom, RSS and emails are all ways that you can subscribe to updates from a website or, if you own a website, that you can allow your readers to subscribe. This allows your visitors to receive updates from their device or program of choice, without having to load the entirety of your site. Atom and RSS typically require feed readers or you users can add them to online services like iGoogle or My Yahoo while email messages go directly to the address with which your visitor signs up.
Misconceptions
-
Atom and RSS are competing technologies; however, when you sign up to receive website updates to your email address, you are not receiving either RSS or Atom feeds. In fact, when choosing email subscriptions, you are not given Atom or RSS as an option. Rather, you will be receiving regular HTML messages. Thus, email subscriptions are compatible for any provider or program that is capable of displaying basic HTML messages.
-
Syndication
-
Atom and RSS are both formats of syndication. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is perhaps the more common of the two and some people use the acronym to refers to add feels or syndication in general. This is especially common because sites such as WordPress create RSS feeds by default for hosted blogs. However, the Atom syndication format is also an option and is even default for blogs published with Google's Blogger service. If you use a service such as Feedblitz or FeedBurner to provide updates to your readers, Atom and RSS will be an option in addition to email subscription.
RSS versus Atom
-
Although most users will not see a difference between Atom and RSS and many readers support both, you may prefer one over the other if you have specific needs. For example, Atom supports both full content and a summary and alerts the reader to which one she is reading. RSS supports a title, link and description for the content but does not require these. Atom requires this information and also offers a last-updated timestamp, among other values, which make Atom the more descriptive of the two. Autodiscovery is an Atom feature that allows the reader's browser to detect a feed on the website, if you use Atom for syndication. However, none of these issues affect email subscription.
-
