Who wants to know what a typical civilized discussion about syndication formats looks like should just follow the link. Surprisingly, Dave Winer behaves very orderly in that thread. The same cannot be said for Mark Pilgrim. Quite amusing - ultimately, what I suspected back then comes to pass: if it's good for nothing else, the Atom format at least makes for a great network psychology experiment. On the technical side: Atom is poorly designed. The louder Pilgrim and his Pilgrim-Fathers-of-Atom-Format shout, the more embarrassing the whole affair becomes. During the discussion about the Atom API, criticism was frequently expressed that PUT and DELETE as HTTP verbs were unusual and often not supported. The comment on that was that these people should just throw their toolkits away if they couldn't handle standard techniques. At the same time, these same people specially invented their own authentication scheme for HTTP just for Atom, which merely reinvents the technique of Digest Auth under a different name and with different syntax - arguing that many toolkits and server technologies don't support Digest Auth. Yes, that's right, the exact same argument was used by Pilgrim and company in two opposite directions. So much for consistency of argumentation.

Another example: there's constant harping on how consistent the Atom format is with respect to tags. Curiously though, while all links in the format are mapped via the Link tag (and specified with corresponding rel attributes), they define three different tags just for date specifications - even though a single Date tag with rel attribute for the type of date would be far more logical in this context.

Also amusing was the discussion about the type of API - many wanted an XMLRPC API, simply because RPC integrates well into programming. What prevailed was the document faction, who prefer an API with REST structure (because documents are natively managed there via GET/POST/PUT/DELETE). Fair enough - I can accept that. But embarrassing was the manner in which various REST proponents tried to argue why XMLRPC wouldn't work. Which is rather silly given the widespread use of XMLRPC for all kinds of purposes. And for someone familiar with RPC-style APIs, the whole discussion was more of a staircase joke than a serious technical discussion. How old is RPC as a programming technique in the Unix environment? 20 years? But of course that's all just imagination...

Well, what can you expect from people who take the fact that Googlegroups and Blogger all forcibly received Atom feeds as the basis for claiming that Atom is already more widespread than RSS today? Now can you understand why it's really no pleasure to deal with content syndication? Only psychopaths and cranks in that field, hardly a mentally normal person to be found. Can someone now explain to me why I programmed my own aggregator for the Python Desktop Server? Here's the original article.