Another syndication shitfest.
Yet another RSS/Atom conflict has broken out, and I think we can draw some conclusions from it.
This is an almost completely intractable situation. A satisfactory solution to this problem is not going to be negotiated between the 2 sides. It's gone way too far for that now, and in the end, it's going to play out in the market.
On the one hand, simply patting the users on the head and saying "Don't you worry your pretty little creative head about it" and expecting them to respond, "ooh, OK" is unrealistic. People are perfectly right to be concerned about the viability of the tools they use. Personally I tend to side with those who say that this is mostly a matter for tool developers. Syndication formats and APIs are infrastructure-level details. Those who argue that users need access to be able to troubleshoot glitches are already so far ahead technically of the majority of people who will use syndication feeds that it's like saying that you need to be able to edit packets by hand so you can troubleshoot your Ethernet connection.
On the other, setting this up as the Imminent Death of All We've Worked So Hard For In Syndication is also a mistake and I think neglects some of the personality conflicts going on behind the whole situation. Some users have been the I think unwitting dupes of this approach, having been convinced by certain interested parties that RSS == scrappy user-lovin' puppies and Atom == baby-eating corporate Nazis. Aside from the fact that Adam Curry can hardly be called a disinterested party to this problem, his ability to publish (or "broadcast" as he puts it) his content through RSS seems safe for the foreseeable future, and should Atom prevail, he's still not going to be typing out his feeds by hand - it's a matter for his tool vendor to address, though I think in this case it's a safe bet that said vendor is not going to be supporting it anytime soon. Saying things like "Asking me to provide 2 formats is a waste of my time" puts me in mind of the insfrastructure argument again - he's not making any effort to publish the format now, the tool vendor is. Aside from the fact that a friend of his who happens to have a horse in this race will be disappointed if Atom wins, why should he possibly have anything invested in why one format or the other wins? I know he thinks that Google's backing of Atom is the end of homey little guy blogging, but I'm not sure how much of this is based in fact and how much it isn't just an odd "what HE said!" version of Stockholm syndrome.
I think the current difficulties for the RSS crowd comes from a certain originating party's past refusal to accept suggestions from other developers wrt the format. Much is made of how receptive he was to end-user requests, but in the case of a file format, the developers are your users as well, and by both giving them little or no say in RSS features, and almost spitefully limiting the format's extensibility, the scene was set to make the Atom fork inevitable. The bluff was called. At this point in time, making purported "offers" which basically just amount to asking the Atom people to drop their work and rename RSS "RSS/Atom" would be insulting if it weren't so laughable. And given past history, Blogger's choice of Atom as their feed standard was pretty much inevitable, one might even say karmic, as well. Atom is not going to disappear, and casting Google as evil (for this anyway, but that's another story) isn't going to work either. I also suspect that had Google announced they were uninterested in supporting Atom and solely endorsed RSS, the reaction would be quite different.
So, enjoy the flamefests, because they're certainly not going to be over anytime soon.