“RSS is the world’s most successful application of XML.”

“The dream of Atom is easy to understand: Every cellphone, every camera, every spreadsheet, every word processor, every browser should now have a ‘Publish File.’”

So says Tim Bray, who is a major contributor to the XML and Atom web standards. He is the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.

I spotted mention of a video-taped discussion with Tim Bray at W-JAX where he talks about RSS and Atom… and specifically the appeal of the Atom Publishing Protocol.

I transcribed his comments (starting about 3:20 into the clip) below:

Matthew Langham: What’s your take now, on let’s say, the syndication formats? Have you seen - what sort of outlook do you see for Atom or even for RSS and/or Atom?

Tim Bray: Right, okay, so RSS is the world’s most successful application of XML. You know - immensely, hugely successful. RSS, for simple, human-to-human, news-oriented blog feeds is perfectly satisfactory. It doesn’t work very well for me because I like to write my own XML and use XML syntax characters in my titles, so that blows up RSS readers.

So, the Atom syndication format is getting pretty good uptake. All the major blogging engines now support it - not all by default, but [unintelligible] them support them by default. But the interesting part of Atom is the Publishing Protocol…

So the Publishing Protocol is an incredibly thin very simple layering over HTTP to pushing anything - words, pictures, movies - onto the web. What’s astounding is that we don’t have a good protocol for doing that. The closest thing is WebDAV. But WebDAV, the implementations are shaky, and the problem is that what we want to do is empower everything, starting with these things [holds up cellphone] to be publishing platforms.

And so the big trick about Atom is if you want to put something new on the web, you don’t have to say its name. You just say, “Here’s the text, or here’s the bits for the picture” and the server comes back and says, “Okay, here’s where I put it, here’s the URL for where I put it.” So the server owns all the problems of managing the service…. a much better division of labor.

So the dream of Atom is easy to understand: Every cellphone, every camera, every spreadsheet, every word processor, every browser should now [have] a “Publish File.” You know, [it] should be: “File Save” and “File Publish.” Everything should be publishing-enabled. So Atom is the protocol to underlie that. And I think it’s going to work… you know, Google’s implementing it, Nokia’s going to implement it on the handsets.

The full video on YouTube can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2sh2NV3q7s

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 14:12 and is filed under syndication, rss, atom, xml. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.