On MT Feed Support
The next version of Movable Type, version 4.15 (aka “Cal”), will remove the RSS feed template from the defaults. This touched off a thread recently was spread across the mtos-dev and ProNet mailing lists discussing the reasoning and potential drawbacks to this decision.
Feeds is a topic near and dear to my heart that I have a long history with. Seems we as a whole have never gotten over all FUD and misinformation of the “syndication wars” that some clarity is needed. Here is the most important takeaway from this post:
There is no longer any practical reason to have multiple feed formats of the same information.
It seems this issue comes up every so often.
Any feed reader or software the consumes feeds worth anything can handle both RSS or Atom feeds. Every modern programming language I know of also have libraries from processing both. Not all take advantage of the more specialized and esoteric features of either — some do, but for most uses either if fine.
Choosing one or the other isn’t choosing sides. It’s a matter of usability and practicality. Having the same feed information in multiple formats forces a user to make a choice that they probably don’t understand and one that is ultimately unnecessary. Dean Allen recently wrote about it and before that Nick Bradbury.
But why did Six Apart choose Atom instead of RSS? MT Product Manager, Byrne Reese posted:
This decision was never about standards politics or what format is better than the other, this release is about performance, and in this day and age, there is no need to publish feeds in multiple formats when they are supported equally[1].
We selected Atom because all things being equal, Atom is an Internet standard and RSS is not, and that is more closely aligned with MTOS’ stated project goals.
[1] Here Byrne asked a post to identify which tools do not support Atom.
It’s also worth mentioning that MT (and other Six Apart tools) are standardizing on the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) for remote clients to interact with the system. AtomPub uses the same format. RSS does not have an equivalent web services API option. Besides that, there are numerous flaws in the design of RSS that can and often does confuse news readers. The RSS specification is frozen with these flaws; however, there are groups attempting to address them in other ways.
From a software architecture and engineering perspective, to me, it’s quite logical that Atom be used. Popularity, as some as cited, is irrelevant given the circumstances and does not make the tool better.
This decision will only effect new blogs created in MT 4.15 and future versions. It does not stop you from using and creating your own RSS feeds nor will it delete, remove or disable them from your current blog templates.
That said, if you are producing feeds in multiple formats, I recommend you pick one and redirect the traffic to the others to that one. Doing so will help improve performance as Byrne suggests in his reply, means one or more less files to generate when a new post in made.
Have a software product that can’t read Atom files? Post them in the comments.
