smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

After some additional thought, I feel I need to address something Ed over at Technology Evangelist continues to debate, regarding Google Reader and Firefox integration and how it favours Atom:

While it’s not a mandate to use Atom with Google, as Brendan mentions, if Google steers people toward Atom through Feedburner and Google Reader preferences, it could turn into a de facto standard which is pretty close to becoming a mandate.

This taps into the imagined fear that one XML format is a bad thing, so it must be resisted because it’s happening right now, man! Which is pretty much proven as little more than FUD, by the RSS format’s stubborn refusal to die and indeed rebirth care of enclosure support. Both RSS and ATOM provide useful feature sets to XML syndication and thus they both continue to be used.

Whilst I have commented on this, I really think I need to cover this in a bit more detail.

There is still room for more than one format. And it’s all the more confusing given Winer has previously given at least partial blessing to Atom. Suddenly it’s evil because Feedburner got bought out by Google who just happen to prefer Atom, so obviously Feedburner will now mandate Atom as either the only, or preferred feed, making it the defacto standard.

Still with me? Cool.

Firefox does not mandate the use of Atom in it’s built-in RSS support. Indeed it supports a number of RSS versions and Atom. If one enables Google Reader integration, Atom is pre-selected as the preferred feed, but one can easily over ride that by adding the RSS version instead. If Google has decided that it will gravitate to Atom by default, that’s their call to make. We, as the end user, can chose to accept that, or not.

Google’s API for Reader actually uses Atom for it’s shared feeds feature. So it’s hardly surprising, as they are likely maximising use of internal Atom code to both handle incoming and outgoing feeds, which leads to a certain amount of standardisation and performance gains.

Ed also seems to miss any format preference displayed by Google isn’t a Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) mandate, rather it’s Google’s code that will be involved. And integration isn’t actually enabled by default. That last sentence is worth noting.

Disabling the integration (if enabled) doesn’t prevent one from subscribing to pretty much any feed format (supported by Google) in the browser. It can pass those requests through to Google Reader, or indeed any other third party application.

Which makes Ed’s final remark regarding choice and control all the more confusing:

To me, this is a control issue. Control is being taken out of the hands of website publishers who provide multiple syndication options for their blog.

I think, actually, this comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening causing a conspiratorial synopsis given in it’s place.

And as far as choice is concerned, those whom have an actual interest in XML formats, are most likely going to want/ have granular control over their choices, so reader integration isn’t useful in that context as it stands, which makes the entire ‘control’ issue little more than a mountain out of a molehill.

The typical reason to have multiple feeds, is as much as anything a throw back to a past time when various XML readers had limited support for a limited range of formats. So a well-behaved publisher would provide a plethora of options so virtually any software with XML support could be used.

In today’s modern readers, that benefit from format improvements, most support a truly staggering range of XML feed types.

As for the publisher? Who supposedly has their choice of feed present thwarted? A single URI to the RSS feed, on any web page, solves the issue. Indeed it’s pretty good practice to ensure you provide a (preferably textual) link to your XML feed(s) to ensure the they can easily be identified.

If you use Explorer (and a higher percentage of you over Firefox do, going by browser share) then this supposed critical ‘control issue’ is entirely moot. Because, my dear IE users, you don’t have Google Reader integration. Which also makes the whole thing a bit of a joke, in this authors opinion.

This is, then, ultimately an XML format storm-in-a-tea-cup, because the majority of people simply don’t care which format happened to ensure they have something to read.