Atom



 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.

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

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.,
 * https://kylewm.com/?feed=atom
 * https://kylewm.com/photos?feed=atom
 * https://kylewm.com/tags/indieweb?feed=atom
 * Entries includes simple reply/repost context

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
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

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)

granary
'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

 * 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   tag:



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
 * granary includes  tags in its atom feeds

readers supporting atom comments:



Examples

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

[...]   11

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
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.

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