" Atom is not better and users don't care":

Facebook is doing the same thing, and I'm pulling back from endorsing them until they take the religion out of their docs. I won't help propogate the myth that one format is better than the other. Users don't care.

Exactly. Users don't care about the technical underpinnings, they only care about the outcomes. And it's much harder to build cool features with RSS - all the "features" I've seen with RSS (beside the obvious one of syndication) are the same thing: take content from one place to another place. Yeah, that was cool ... like 5 years ago.

RSS works great for the specific purpose it was created: publishing public content. At that point, it doesn't matter. To say Atom is "better" than RSS there is useless. But RSS cannot be extended to do cooler things - we could have never built a whole API for Deki Wiki using RSS (for the record, we didn't use APP, but we *could* have, that's the point here).

If we want to strand users in 2001 for the next ten years, then yes, please adopt RSS and don't push for APP.

But the faster more web apps get on-board the APP protocol (and Atom) as a format, the easier it becomes to write tools to consume those feeds and remix them.

Nobody can claim enough foresight to see what the web is gonna look like 5-6 years from now, so how about we at least set a firm foundation for the future?

It's like when you're deciding to find a place to live: you can take the short-term view to fulfill a need ("I need a place to live") - many places will do just fine. But when you factor in the long-term view ("Will this place appreciate in value? If I start a family will it be a good place?") your needs change dramatically. Hell, it may not even matter, but the fact of the matter is that we leave future generations of web developers more tools and a better foundation if we converge on APP.

. . .

Two thoughts in passing for Tabulas:

• Would be interesting for every publicly accessible URL to also be an API endpoint.
• Webservice hooks