13 Looking Forward to Atom 1.0 (Web hosting isp) At the
13 Looking Forward to Atom 1.0 At the time of writing the Atom 1.0 specification is under active development at the IETF. The RSS specifications all have some degree of ambiguity in the specification documents and they all attempt to be backwards compatible with their precursor formats. One of the intentions of the Atom effort is to improve the quality of the specification documents. Another is to create an information feed format free from a need to conform to earlier specifications. However, Atom 1.0 aims to go beyond simply creating a tidier, better specified feed format. It also includes the development of a protocol that can be used by blogging and similar software to update server-side resources in a standard way. The aim of the information feed aspect of the Atom activity at IETF is to create a widely accepted Atom format that would be treated as a standard, perhaps the standard, in the information feed space. In that component of the Atom project, Atom 1.0 resembles RSS 2.0 and, to a smaller degree, RSS 1.0. The Atom 1.0 feed format, like Atom 0.3, is written in XML. The Atom 0.3 specification was a foundation for the development of Atom 1.0. At the time of writing some changes have been made from the document structure of the Atom 0.3 format, with further changes possible. The Atom Protocol was designed to be a standard way for blogging-related software to communicate to a server edits made in content and in a corresponding information feed to the server from where the Web pages are requested and the information delivered. In this chapter you learn: . Motivations for an additional feed format specification . What Atom 1.0 is . What the document structure of the Atom 1.0 feed format may be . About the other aspects of Atom 1.0 The description of the Atom 1.0 feed document structure described in this chapter is subject to change. The description in this chapter is based on the October 2004 draft of the Atom Syndication format located at http://atompub.org/2004/10/20/ draft-ietf-atompub-format-03.html.