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Atom was created because the RSS people refused to fix the ambiguities with RSS. Almost immediately after Atom was finalized, the RSS people changed their mind and fixed the big issues. So now there's really not much reason to choose Atom instead of RSS. Atom ended up being a big waste of time; actually, it wasn't a mere waste of time, it is actually harmful. Now everybody who deals with feeds has to deal with 4 kinds of RSS + Atom, instead of just 4 kinds of RSS.

You could argue that Atom wasn't a waste of time because it got the RSS people to fix their stuff.

It's a great example of why competition is good.

Please summarize what's better about Atom for me, I'm interested. (I assume you mean Atom, as the other respondent did).

perhaps this will help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29#Atom_compar...

but the most important, for me, is that Atom is a group effort under the IETF rather than an ad-hoc spec in one person's head. All other benefits are the result of that.

Atom?