The Courtship of Atom
Kendall Grant Clark,
XML.Com,
May 21, 2004
Atom is the name of the community driven alternative to RSS that developed in response to the endless conflicts over RSS. Adopted by Google's Blogger system and other major players, it is a viable candidate to replace RSS (eventually) for a number of reasons. As this article notes, however, the weakness of the community driven model is that there is no means of resolving disputes - this is, in fact, exactly what encumbered RSS. So the people behind Atom are talking with the people behind the World Wide Web Consortium about having the W3C take on Atom as a specification. This is a good idea, not because I like the W3C's process (I don't), but because the W3C's process is infinitely better than, say, IEEE or OASIS. And I think that Atom would be good for the W3C which is, as the author notes, far more interested in knowledge representation and logic programming than it is technologies people actually use. But - and this is a big but - there must be a means for Atom developers to become involved in the W3C process. There isn't really a good one now, since the W3C is oriented more toward organizations, and freezing out the original developers would in essence represent the end of Atom as a community driven initiative.
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