David A. Harding
Saturday, 14 Jan 2006
The web finally becomes as much fun as email and USENET.
—Elliotte Rusty Harold
We are in a period of change. ``As big a change as the original web,'' according to Mr. Elliotte Rusty Harold. Mr. Harold was one of two presenters at the Linux User's Group in Princeton last night. The other presenter was Mr. Harold's hands—which, in a non-stop performance, communicated Mr. Harold's absolute enthusiasm for his subject, RSS, Atom, OPML, and All That: a Course for Developers.
Mr. Harold began by demonstrating his personal favourite news aggregator, Vienna, a free (libre and gratis) RSS and Atom client for Mac OSX. The primary advantage of using a news aggregator is the ability to consume a large quanity of information. And if consuming that much information isn't enough, you ``can manage an order of magnitude greater amount of information,'' he said. But Mr. Harold doesn't want us to stop there: ``ultimately, [it] is about making the web a two-way read/write medium.''
But what does making the web a read and write medium have to do with the RSS and Atom syndication formats? Even Mr. Harold says, ``RSS and Atom are essentially a reader's [Application Program Interface] (API)'' But then he explains: ``The best tools solve more problems than their inventors intended.'' Atom is one of those tools. Atom is a much-advanced replacement for RSS, and ``in 2006, you should insist on Atom support'' in your blogging and aggregating software.
You should insist because Atom is better than RSS, but you should also insist because Atom is going beyond syndication. In development is the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP): a two-way REpresentational State Transfer (REST) based protocol. APP will allow the posting of blogs, comments, or anything else using HTTP from any enabled application. The dream is a web that can be read or edited with arbitrary tools, the reality is close, and when it happens the headline will be, ``the web finally becomes as much fun as email and USENET.''