RSS Advisory Board: This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the trouble that turned the Atom feed format. All of it started on June 16, 2003, with a weblog submit from Apache Software program Basis contributor Sam Ruby asking for suggestions about what constitutes a well-formed weblog entry. The event of RSS 2.0 had been an unplanned hopscotch from a small group at Netscape to a smaller one at UserLand Software program, however Atom was a barn elevating. A whole bunch of software program builders, net publishers and technologists gathered for a dialogue within the summary that led to a concrete effort to construct a well-specified syndication format and related publishing API that might turn into Web requirements. Work was carried out on a challenge wiki that grew to over 1,500 pages. Every part was up for a vote, together with a plebiscite on selecting a reputation that ballooned right into a four-month-long bikeshed dialogue through which Pie, Echo, Wingnut, Feedcast, Phaistos and several other dozen alternate options lastly, mercifully, miraculously misplaced out to Atom.
The highway map of the Atom wiki lists the individuals, firms and tasks that jumped on the probability to create a brand new format for feeds. XML specification co-author Tim Bray wrote: “The time to write down all of it down and standardize it’s not whenever you’re first struggling to invent the expertise. We now have aggregators and publishing methods and serps and you-name-it, and I believe the neighborhood collectively understands fairly nicely what you want, what you do not want, and what an excellent syntax appears to be like like. So, now’s the time.”
