My Mom Should Subscribe to Feeds
RSS and Atom are specifications that I use to produce blog feeds. They’re implementation decisions. The functionality that I’m offering is a feed, so when I talk to users I should call the functionality “feeds.” It seems so simple now.
Marc Hedlund broached this topic on O’Reilly Radar twice (first | second) without getting any agreement. It took a post from Evan Henshaw-Plath about the strength of podcasting as a name vs. RSS as a name to clear up the issue for me. From now on I resolve to only refer to RSS feeds as “feeds” unless I am talking about implementation issues.
September 17th, 2005 at 9:18 pm
Thanks for the link, but i’ve got one question, where’d the smith thing come from? My name is Evan Henshaw-Plath (as in the same name as Sylvia Plath, the well known poet who eventually stuck her head in an oven.)
Anyway, i hope we call all more move to using the term feeds and make sure that mimetypes and the like figure out what application to send them to… users don’t need to know that stuff.
September 19th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Evan, fixed. My bad. The fact checker was on vacation.