Remember Ted…

Dear Ted

Your geeks are taking both of us for a ride.

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved.

I was going to post a note saying that it would be better if you redirected to the new feed, but then I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask – why??

Do you want to lose subscribers?

Because that’s what happened. I can’t read your feed anymore Ted. I’ll survive, but I will miss your posts.

So it’s odd that today, a mere 7 months later, Dave is suddenly the bastion of syndication fairness…

Edit all docs and specs accordingly. Everywhere it says “Atom is better” remember “Users don’t care.”

Facebook is doing the same thing, and I’m pulling back from endorsing them until they take the religion out of their docs. I won’t help propogate the myth that one format is better than the other. Users don’t care.

If you must answer the question “What’s the difference between RSS and Atom?” just say they’re different flavors of the same thing. Even better would be to find a way to avoid raising the question at all. Test your reader against all formats with significant installed bases, and do what you can to keep the number of formats to a minimum.

What makes this even more amusing is that the issue here isn’t Facebook supporting RSS over Atom but simply that they mention Atom in their documentation. Apparently in Dave’s world it is now a sin to even mention Atom without also paying tribute to RSS.

(I should point out that in every official Facebook document I was able to find the company was careful to use “Atom/RSS” but something had to set Dave off)

EyeOnWiner adds: isn’t it curious that Dave’s argument against mentioning ATOM is that “users don’t care” but as soon as someone actually starts using ATOM, the users do care. Specifically, Dave cares. He ignores the possibility that some users feel the same way about ATOM that he does about RSS.