I guess now's as good a time as any to jump into the Atom vs. RSS debate. (I've been meaning to post this for a while...) For those of you who don't follow the exciting world of weblog syndication, the venerable RSS syndication format is under attack by a young upstart format named Atom. While the development of Atom was started only eight months ago, it has caught on quickly in the weblog world, and most weblog software now supports it as well as a number of prominent sites such as LiveJournal and Blogger.

Why a new syndication format? Mostly the issue seems to be over the control of the RSS spec. While RSS was originally developed by Netscape, it was abandoned as the company lost market traction, and Dave Winer took over maintenance of the specification. The problem is, Dave Winer doesn't seem to understand how standards are supposed to be maintained and developed, and many people feel he is exerting undue control over the future of RSS.

So, to take advantage of starting from scratch, the Atom standard goes beyond just defining a "syndication" format. A format for accessing archived entries was created, and there are even standardized mechanisms for posting new entries and updating old entries. Soon, the variety of weblog update clients that LiveJournal users have available will be able to update and maintain weblogs running on any server software using the Atom API.

The Atom spec is cleaner and better designed than RSS, and as a result can support a much wider range of uses. Wiki sites are already using Atom to publish entries and accept new submissions. Want to publish XML-formatted security updates with Atom? You can embed your XML directly into the feed without having to entity-escape it, allowing much simpler implementation of the parsers. Atom supports feeding information from machine-to-machine, instead of just the machine-to-person format that RSS imposes by its poor design.

Hopefully, more sites will discover nifty uses for Atom, and it will become the starting point for growing the semantic web beyond the current content syndication rut we're stuck in now. The sooner we discard RSS in favor of Atom, the sooner we can move on.