Re: Shipping Atom products prematurely

[Antone Roundy <antone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, August 17, 2004, at 08:56  AM, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> Once Google made Atom 0.3 the only format supported by
> certain Blogger sites aggregator authors were
> pressured to implement a interim version of the draft
> spec. There are now literally thousands of desktop
> aggregators that support Atom 0.3 on users desktops.
> I've counted aboyut 50,000 downloads of RSS Bandit
> versions wioth Atom 0.3 support. Both FeedDemon and
> SharpReader are more popular so it isn't inconceivable
> for there to be 100,000 - 200,000 users out there who
> are dependent on major sityes providing Atom 0.3
> feeds. This number is growing by tens of thousands of
> users a month.
>
> 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?
If "Google [makes] Atom [1.0] the only format supported by certain 
Blogger sites aggregator authors [will be] pressured to implement ... 
version [1.0] of the ... spec."  Those users won't be any more out of 
luck than they were when Google moved from RSS to Atom 0.3.  They'll 
have to wait however long it takes till aggregator authors implement 
Atom 1.0 support, and then upgrade their aggregator.

Google could, of course, continue to support 0.3 for a while, perhaps 
enabling each blog to have 2 versions of the feed.  After a few months, 
or however long seems appropriate, they could drop 0.3 support.  
Anybody who hadn't bothered setting up a 1.0 feed but did have an 0.3 
feed could suddenly find it changed to 1.0.  Anybody who had both would 
end up with just the one.

Antone

P.S. No need to CC me on messages on this thread...or any other thread 
for that matter.