Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Atom publishing protocol published

October 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Atom publishing protocol published

TAGS: Web development

The Atom Publishing Protocol, an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources, has been published, according to Sun Microsystems.

Based on HTTP transfer of Atom-formatted representations, the Atom format is documented in the Atom Syndication Format.

Atom development was motivated by the presence of many incompatible versions of the RSS syndication format, which had poor interoperability for XML-RPC-based publishing protocols. Published as an Internet Engineering Task Force proposed standard as RFC (Request for Comment) 4287, it was published as RFC 5023.

Atom is important because it will make it easier to post to the Web, said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun, who co-chaired the standard. He discussed it in his blog.

"Here at Sun, in a blogging-friendly tech-savvy culture, maybe 5 percent of the people post regularly. So I look at the number of people using the Net and I wonder, why aren’t there 50 million, instead of five million, people contributing every week? The answer: because it’s too hard. We can fix that," Bray said.

"Here’s the Atom dream: a "publish' button on everything," Bray said. "On every word processor and email reader and Web browser and cell phone and PDA and spreadsheet and photo-editor and digicam and outliner and sales-force tracker. Really, everywhere. If it doesn’t have a 'Publish' button, it’s broken."

The AtomPub WG was chartered to work on the syndication format in RFC 4287 and the publishing protocol in RFC 5023. Implementations of these specifications work together and interoperate well to support publishing and syndication of text content and media resources, according to Sun. Both documents are now classified as Proposed Standards by the IETF.

Posted by Paul Krill on October 24, 2007 09:11 AM

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