I don't follow. Out there in the world, RSS feeds provide their feeds in Atom format. The technical format is called "Atom" and the functionality that the Atom format implements is called "RSS".
In what sense did technically-correct Atom get trumped by anything? This is like complaining that social factors caused "the SAT" to get trumped by "standardized testing".
Your confusion probably comes from the fact that RSS is older, so it's sometimes used as the name of the functionality but it's improper. They're 2 different formats.
There are feed formats named "RSS". There is a feed format named "Atom". And there is a concept named "RSS". The RSS formats, like the Atom format, are all implementations of the RSS concept. Generally, when you subscribe to an RSS feed somewhere, it will be in the Atom format. It's still called an "RSS feed" for the simple reason that that is the name of the concept.
> it's sometimes used as the name of the functionality but it's improper.
No it isn't. What would you gain by insisting that RSS feeds delivered via Atom have to be called something different than RSS feeds delivered in legacy formats? Did we rename TLS when we updated the cipher suites?
Why, in your opinion, is rssboard.org even bothering to write about Atom?
Instead I'd say that Atom feeds and RSS feeds are each an implementation of the syndication concept.
The concept is called a (web/news) feed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
> It's still called an "RSS feed" for the simple reason that that is the name of the concept.
No, it's because "RSS" is acting as an adjective to the noun of "feed". See also "Atom feed": Atom being the adjective, feed being the noun (concept).
> RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication)[2] is a web feed[3] that […]
I just checked a few of the ones I follow, and ... turns out I don't immediately know how to distinguish when there's not a specific xml namespace reference in the doc or such.
But according to Wikipedia the RFC822 timestamps I'm seeing suggest they're RSS2 instead of Atom?
Atom feeds will almost always have <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> as the root element. In some cases they may use namespace prefixes but that tends to be rarer and less interoperable.
RSS feeds have an <rss version="2.0"> root element.