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I remember the original announcement - they used it for Netscape Netcenter to fetch Associated Press articles for the Netscape home page. I was around when David Winer "claimed it" and changed a few things to support podcast "attachment" (note this is not plural - that was the downfall of RSS). Then he gave the IP rights to Harvard Law School. Atom was created to resolve the attachment and IP situations. Then Google came out with phase one of EEE and produced bastard feeds that were really RSS 0.96 (complete with Dublin Core) or whatever wrapped in Atom - because they could. This meant if your software once read a single format you had to adapt it to handle all of them, plus Yahoo media and Dublin Core and a dozen other microformats. This killed off a lot of readers so Google could dominate. Then atom was extended by ActivityStreams1 and turned into a federation protocol (OStatus). Then Google killed off both their own feeds and later their reader product. So I kind of understand the mess. My best advice is still not to maintain the steaming pile of shit but I don't have any real problem with it. Atom (without activities and without embedded RSS) isn't bad - but otherwise we're basically just choosing which piles of shit to rally behind. Actually for my own software I should probably go back to pure Atom - as I don't need to federate with OStatus these days and I admittedly added in my own stuff to support DFRN over OStatus a decade ago. I'm not trying to get in a fight - just thinking out loud. So pure Atom (WITH discovery) is what I choose to support after weighing the alternatives. I'll push it out today or tomorrow after I remove the extra baggage.

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