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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious: why is this using RSS? RSS is uniformly technically inferior to Atom, and all feed reader apps that I know of support Atom, and libraries are available for both (some RSS-only, some Atom-only, some general). The only place I’d ever use RSS now is podcast feeds, because podcast feeds haven’t caught up up with 2007 yet.

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Most likely: RSS has better brand recognition than Atom feeds. There’s probably not a single RSS reader that doesn’t support Atom too.

RSS is basically a synonym for Atom at this point.

Ultimately, once I've subscribed to a feed, I don't care whether it is RSS or Atom...just that my feed reeder works with it.

For the most part you only care that it’s a feed, but the technical inferiority of RSS does matter from time to time. My favourite example is having things that look like HTML markup in a title. All RSS specs are silent on what that means and there’s no popular XML namespace that fixes that like with content:encoded¹. So some clients will treat it as plain text, some will treat it as HTML and strip it, some will treat it as HTML and render it. (Some will double-encode it, but that’s a bug in the reader. Atom probably won’t save you from that kind of error.) The result is that in RSS you simply can’t safely use <, > or & in a title, because no matter how you do it, it will be mangled by some meaningful fraction of clients. Meanwhile, Atom has <title type="text"> and <title type="html"> and the problem is averted; almost all clients will get it right, and any that get it wrong are unquestionably buggy so you can file a bug report and hopefully get it fixed.

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¹ And seriously the whole podcast RSS scene is full of “well RSS is bad, so let’s add our own elements to fix it” namespaces, so that you’re writing the same thing four or five times, where Atom would have obviated at least some of those.

https://docs.rsshub.app/en/parameter.html#output-formats

It does support atom. You need .atom at the end. By default, it's rss V2.

There is no reason to use Atom. RSS has in practice some specifics like content:encoded and description that are strange at first look, but by now are solved in every reader. So why not just use the standard that works?

As someone who has done this: it's not solved in every reader, and the standards do not work.

Atom is interoperable and extensible and great care was taken during design and implementation testing to achieve these goals.

RSS, OTOH, is garbage on fire ruined by one man's ego.

https://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/arc...

16 years is a long time. Is there anything that reflects the current state of RSS?

There’s pretty much no documentation of anything in the feed world past 2007. Everything interesting happened between 2002 and 2007, and then everyone forgot about it because it was good enough¹ and we could just keep copying the code we wrote last time.

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¹ Except podcasts. Have I mentioned them? They’re still frozen in 2004.

Big +1 on that one, let's forget RSS and move to Atom :)

You can get everything as ATOM, as well. From the docs:

    RSSHub conforms to RSS 2.0 and Atom Standard, simply append 
    .rss .atom to the end of the feed address to obtain the feed 
    in corresponding format, default to RSS 2.0.

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