Tim Bray: It’s cooked and ready to serve. There are a couple of IETF process things to do, but this draft (HTML version) is essentially Atom 1.0.
Randy: I see everybody has already commented on it. I'll run down the best of the comments here.
Don Park: Apparently, Atom 1.0 syntax spec is now at the end of the runway. [cut] Sillyness followed by misinformation. [cut] More half-truths.
Randy: Don doesn't seem very pleased. It seems the Atom crew are creating documents describing why Atom should be used instead of RSS 2.0. The documents, I agree with Don, are mostly half-truths.
James Robertson: I'll add a double agreement on one point that Don makes - the Atom astronauts make this claim: [cut] "No significant changes can be made [to RSS 2.0]." Yep, no further work on RSS, none. iTunes? Move along, nothing to see there, move along.
Jon Udell: Because today's blogging infrastructure delivers those benefits sufficiently well, I don't see a pressing need for most people (or rather, for the blogging tools that most people use) to replace RSS with Atom. But if things evolve in the direction I hope they will -- towards richer payloads when content is syndicated among people ("publishing") and machines ("data exchange") -- then Atom will really start to shine. To the many folks who labored over this specification: thanks for a job well done!
Bill de hÓra: Anyone publishing with the defunct 0.3 format can now start fixing their templates to use Atom 1.0.
Randy: Atom 1.0 is clearly much simpler and better defined than Atom 0.3, which partially validates the IETF process. On the other hand, I was most interested in the API, which lags in committee.
History: Atom's roots go back to a Don Box blog post from May 2003. The post has long been removed (remnants here), but the movement eventually turned into the pie project, championned by Sam Ruby, renamed Atom and sold to the IETF for an undisclosed late round draft pick
Randy
Agreed, the copyright was a bad idea.
Randy