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Comment by dlbucci | Hacker News Reader

Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?

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It seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is indeed better [0].

[0]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

Basically interchangeable, to the point where it is extremely rare that a tool will work with one and not the other.

(Not the same code path, just that a tool to work with RSS will usually end up also supporting ATOM and vice-versa.)

At this point Atom is basically just the technical name for protocol that powers RSS.

I think it's a situation sort of like with SSL and TLS, where the former term implies the latter. I mean, it's not rare to find people using the term "SSL Certificates" even on TLS-only setups. Also:

https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Libssl_API

> libssl is the portion of OpenSSL which supports TLS

It's for TLS support yet they call it "libssl".

So yeah, you can just mentally replace "RSS" with "RSS/Atom" and most of the time it'll be fine.

Most rss readers work with Atom too, but more people know what RSS is than "atom", which is also text editor and a processor and a particle

Atom was an improvement, but not enough of an improvement to convince people to upgrade from a large installed base.

They're interchangeable; any significant RSS reader is also an Atom reader.

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