Re: Shipping Atom products prematurely

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

At 8:59 PM -0400 8/17/04, James Robertson wrote:
> That's a pretty lame answer, to be honest.  What advantages would 
> you expect there to be?

Wow, an engineer is *asking* for a marketing shpiel. :-)

- We expect it to be tigher and better-defined than previous RSSs so 
that there will be better long-term interoperability.

- We expect there to be standard features like publishing and 
autodiscovery that will help Atom users in ways that are unavailable 
in previous RSSs.

- We expect that the extensibility will be cleaner and better defined 
so that small markets will be able to use Atom easier than previous 
RSSs.

None of that might spin your beanie. One big reason many of us are 
working on Atom is that we believe that RSSish syndication can become 
a major communication mechanism for literally decades to come (look 
at RFC 822 and MIME, for instance). If that is true, it should have 
the most polished, most reviewed, and clearest spec possible.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium