I’ve been looking at Atom a bit and just as it seems to be with many all standards, the first thing is to figure out where things are in the standardization process. I thought I had it figured out a couple of weeks ago, and started a blog post on the subject (which I never quite finished) but now I stumble upon more. Something pretty significant as it relates to Atom, surprising that I didn’t find it before (read, “how can I find related content if someone hasn’t explicitly placed the relationship in the content that I do know about?”)
Anyway, here is the overview that I’ve managed to build:
There are two parts to Atom. 1) the syndication format and 2) the publishing protocol.
The status of syndication format is that it is an RFC (Request for Comment), RFC4287, which kind of means it has reached some level of completion. The document linked here is dated December 2005, though there are numerous articles that credit the completion of the spec as summer of 2005. It’s worth noting that completion of a spec is not what makes a successful standard – it is adoption that makes a standard and it looks like in this respect that the Atom syndication format is a winner – see supporters. BTW, this version of Atom is called Atom 1.0
- While the text version of the document is the only normative one, I have found this HTML version to be much friendlier on the eye
The status of the publishing protocol is that an Internet Draft is posted – the link above is to the latest draft dated May 22, 2007. Being an Internet Draft indicates that the specification is still work in progress. Products may support portions of these drafts however, an Internet Draft is still a work in progress and likely to change.
What I found today is an Atom wiki that is being used to work on both the syndication format as well as the publishing protocol. Near as I can tell, all of the Atom notables including Tim Bray, James Snell and Sam Ruby and it seems that Sam is putting up the wiki for this group. And while a good number of the issues being discussed center around the publishing protocol, there are also many interesting discussions around enhancements to the syndication format. I haven’t been able to dig up any significant information on whether there are any formalized plans for a new version of the Atom syndication format but will update this post if I unearth anything.
Most of the proposals being discussed on this Atom wiki include the prefix “Pace” – a little digging unearthed a comment made in this mailing list post, in response to a query as to the meaning of this prefix:
“Originally, I was searching for an acronym. One that perhaps combined words like Proposal, Atom, Change, Enhancement. In the process I found a word that connoted forward motion[1], consensus[2], and peace[3].” – Sam Ruby
