A lead developer at Amazon has some interesting thoughts on the merits of the two leading syndication XML formats, Atom and RSS. Interestingly he comes out firmly on the side of Atom:

While I don’t want to get embroiled in a format war, I will say that I’ve found the Atom 1.0 standard to meet the needs of nearly every single problem that I’ve thrown at it. Amazingly so, actually. I’ve been consistently impressed with how well the authors of the Atom syndication format anticipated the needs of the advanced content syndication community. There has yet to be a use-case that I’ve explored — and I work with some thorny ones — in which Atom has let me down.

Apparently (correct me if I’m wrong), RSS 2.0 doesn’t allow you to say what information the feed is syndicating, and so that makes it unreadable by machines (unless the computer has already been told what type the data is), and so you end up losing half the point of an XML feed since a computer can’t really do much with something it doesn’t understand. Atom, on the other hand, allows you to say what type of data you are transferring and thus makes the format much more versatile.

Scoble says that the reason that RSS has triumphed despite its apparent inferiority is because it has both a publishing and aggregation system, and Atom doesn’t. Whilst I can see his point that there is no aggregation tool a la Share Your OPML that demonstrates the advantages of Atom over RSS, I disagree with him over the publishing tool argument. Neither Manilla or Radio Userland show inherent advantages of RSS. They were just first in the market place. And the same goes for RSS. It isn’t the market (if it can be called that) leader because it is better, or because it has been demonstrated better. It is in the market because it was there first.
[via Scobleizer]