Atom

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Atom is an XML format and protocol for publishing feeds that was developed as a more formally specified alternative to RSS.

Looking for some other Atom? See: Other Things Called Atom

h-entry and h-feed are microformats2 vocabularies based on Atom, which supersede the classic hAtom microformat.

Atom is defined in RFC 5023 (format) and RFC 4287 (protocol). atomenabled.org was the canonical web site, but it died.

IndieWeb Examples

Tantek

Tantek Çelik generates (using Falcon) a minimal subset Atom+ActivityStreams feed on tantek.com from storage. Due to bandwidth inefficiency of XML formats (and apparent bandwidth abuse of XML consuming code/servers), his Atom feed file only has the most recent 1 item(s), whereas his h-feed on his home page has the latest 64 items (as of 2015-265). See also feed file: Criticism and in particular feed: Criticism.

Barnaby Walters

Barnaby publishes auto-discoverable ATOM feeds on all feed pages using Taproot on waterpigs.co.uk e.g. the homepage since ????-??-??.

The feeds are automatically generated from the h-entry microformats on the page, so I only have to maintain the HTML which works for humans and machines rather than two copies. The endpoint I use for converting is open for anyone to use: microformats to ATOM --Barnaby Walters 10:17, 10 February 2015 (PST)

Christian Weiske

Christian Weiske's blog natively generates full-text atom feeds for tag-filtered and all posts

Kyle Mahan

Kyle Mahan publishes an Atom feed for all post feeds (most recent iteration since 2014-09-13).

add ?feed=atom to any regular feed for an Atom version. e.g.,
Entries includes simple reply/repost context

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill publishes an Atom feed for articles as of 2015-02-11

http://gregorlove.com/articles.atom
Previously I was publishing an RSS 2.0 feed that was delivered by FeedBurner. I migrated back to a self-hosted feed due to the unsure future of FeedBurner, plus having more control of the feed since it is on my own domain again.

As of 2016-03-08, I'm experimenting with Granary to convert my notes h-feed into an Atom feed.

http://gregorlove.com/notes.atom

Anthony Ciccarello

Anthony Ciccarello publishes an Atom feed of all posts (article, recipe, and photo).

https://www.ciccarello.me/feed.xml
Have XSL for viewing from a browser (blog post)
Feed is limited to 30 posts with only the first 10 full text

Past Examples

Sandeep Shetty

sandeep.io (now redirects to a Blogger blog) previously generated an Atom feed from h-feed (using an h-feed to atom proxy). See DRY: h-feed enabled = Atom enabled (was at http://www.sandeep.io/98) -Www.sandeep.io 14:06, 30 June 2013 (PDT)

Projects

granary

Ryan Barrett's granary fetches and converts Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+ data to and from Atom, as well as other formats like ActivityStreams and microformats2 HTML/JSON.

hfeed2atom

hfeed2atom converts h-feeds to atom feeds.

Unmung

Main article: unmung

unmung generates an h-feed from any Atom or RSS one

Autodiscovery

Atom feeds can be automatically discovered by feed readers if the homepage contains a link to it in its <head> tag:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Feed" href="atomfeed.xml" />

The title is important if there are multiple feeds linked, e.g. category and comment feeds.

Comments

The Atom Threading Extensions RFC 4685 extends the Atom XML format to allow direct embedding of comments for posts/entries in the atom feed, as well as linking to comment feed files for single posts.

Software generating Atom feeds with comments:

Wordpress ([1], [2])
granary includes <thr:in-reply-to> tags in its atom feeds

readers supporting atom comments:

(?)

Examples

https://david.shanske.com/feed/atom/ contains:

<entry>
 [...]
 <link rel="replies" type="text/html" href="https://david.shanske.com/2018/03/18/an-indieweb-podcast-episode-0/#comments" thr:count="11"/>
 <link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://david.shanske.com/2018/03/18/an-indieweb-podcast-episode-0/feed/atom/" thr:count="11"/>
 <thr:total>11</thr:total>
</entry>

Shutdowns

See: Feeds: Shutdowns

Criticism

See: Criticism of legacy feed formats

History

This section is a stub. For additional history see Wikipedia: Atom Development History (though it may not have all the details present here).

Conceived

2003-06-16 The effort to define a "conceptual data model of what constitutes a well formed log entry" blogged by Sam Ruby in Anatomy of a Well Formed Log Entry was the start of what became Atom.

Launch

2003-06-23 the effort that became Atom was more formerly launched, with various supporting blog posts in the following days. A small sample from the launch roadmap:
- 2013-06-23 Aaron Swartz: Time for Forward Motion [Aaron co-authored RSS 1.0]
- 2013-06-24 Mena Trott: On The Roadmap [Mena co-founded SixApart, a very early blogging startup]

Pie

Pie was the original name given the to the syndication format project that became Atom. Early posts/pages that mention Pie and its use as a starting point

http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/ProjectNameProcess

Echo

Echo was the second name given the to syndication format project that became Atom. Early pages/posts that mention Echo:

2003-06-29 Ben Trott: Why We Need Echo (original permalink dead: www.sixapart.com/blog/2003/06/why-we-need-ech.html )
Pie wiki: Echo Conflicts With Another Project

Atom named

2003-09-30 Voting closed, "Atom" clear winner among numerous proposals.

RSS Atom wars

Main article: RSS Atom wars

From 2003-2007 (at least) there was significant energy put into debating the merits of using Atom vs RSS. This quite heated ongoing debate earned the name of "RSS Atom Wars" or "syndication wars".

See: RSS Atom wars for citations and quotes from articles during this time period that illustrate the tensions and conflicts.

Other Things Called Atom

Atom.io

Atom.io was a code editor from GitHub, discontinued on 2022-12-15.