Stop publishing in RSS

People who generate syndication feeds have a choice of feed formats. The major candidates are Atom1.0 , RSS2.0, RSS1.0.The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made (although the specification is under a Creative Commons license) and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work.Atom 1.0 is specified in RFC 4287 (HTML Version); it represents the consensus of the Atompub Working Group within the IETF, as reviewed and approved by the IETF community and the Internet Engineering Steering Group. The specification is structured in such a way that the IETF could conceivably issue further versions or revisions of this specification without breaking existing deployments. Its high time that everyone in the Feeds community get together and decide to leave their differences in the past, and create one standard format. As for me, I have worked on both Atom and RSS, and personally feel that the Atom community is far more stable, better accepted, has more support, and more developers working on that. So, I strongly feel that RSS format should be scraped.

The actual problem with multiple formats is that, different readers (like bloglines) consume different formats(in some cases the consume more than one format). So all the sites/ blog platforms that support Atom are publishing multiple feeds in the autodiscovery section of the blog. So when a user goes to subscribe to the blog the browser presents a completely confusing choice of multiple feeds to subscribe to. That choice is meaningless to blog readers and just causes unnecessary anxiety. Even blogger advertises both RSS and Atom :( . Ironically, many of the RSS links are published through Feedburner which has some automatic feed rewriting that ends up serving Atom anyway.

Although RSS was the first format, it lost its way/value somewhere in the middle. It was a great idea which was started in Netscape. But clearly Atom is way more matured compared to RSS. Its time for RSS to be retired.