« Reading List: Warped Passages | Main | Flashback Version 1.4 Posted »
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Fourmilog: New Atom 1.0 Feed, Feed Validation
If you scroll down to the “Syndication” item on the panel to the right, you'll see that the icon for the former Atom 0.3 feed has been replaced with one providing both headlines and full content in the Atom 1.0 format as specified in RFC 4287. Atom is an XML 1.0-compliant format which makes a fresh start, escaping the historical hysteresis which has rendered the various flavours of the RSS “standard” unable to agree even on what the acronym stands for. Client support for Atom is spotty at this point: Firefox 1.5 turns Atom feeds into “Live Bookmarks” without problems, but Thunderbird 1.0.7 doesn't seem to accept them for “News & Blogs” subscriptions. I've removed the icon for the previous Atom 0.3 feed, since the Atom people are encouraging quick migration to the new standard but the feed, in fact, will remain available for the foreseeable future as long as you know the name of the file containing it. Each of the feed buttons now has a check mark to the right of it which, when clicked, will subject the feed to the scrutiny of the W3C Feed Validator. If your client program complains about something in one of the feeds, click the check mark to see whether the W3C agrees there's a problem. I have also added a check button to the RSS 1.0 feed for the reading list page; that is the only format available on that page.Posted at February 14, 2006 00:47