Re: Shipping Atom products prematurely

[Robert Sayre <mint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> What the heck is going to happen once Atom 1.0 comes
> out. Will all these users be out of luck or will
> Google/Blogger continue supporting Atom 0.3
> indefinitely? What happens when even more sites follow
> Google's lead? 
>

How about they deploy the Atom 1.0 feeds at new URIs, and permanently 
redirect the Atom 0.3 feeds after a reasonable period of time.

I got sick of maintaining RSS feeds on my own site, so I stuck permanent 
redirects from the old RSS URIs to the Atom feed. Seemed to work just 
fine. After a month or so, I rarely got requests for the RSS files.


Mark Nottingham wrote:
>
> Remember that the deployment footprint of Atom is still relatively
> small, especially on the consumer side; if we don't check this, it will
> be very large, and people will start arguing "we can't change feature X
> in the draft because vendor Y has already shipped n million units that
> depend upon it."

While I share your concern, I think it's too late. The best-of-breed 
clients already support Atom 0.3. I think Radio is the only major client 
that doesn't. It's a capability that consumers expect, and competitors 
will point out "lack of Atom support" if an aggregator doesn't support 0.3.

Robert Sayre