Atom Beats RSS: Why Your Blog Feed Should Ditch the Old Standard
RSS Feed Best Practices (2022)
Kevin Cox's technical guide argues that Atom is the superior feed format due to its clearer specification and fewer compatibility issues. He provides a minimal Atom template and covers essential best practices: setting correct Content-Type headers, using absolute URLs, enabling feed discovery via HTML link tags, serving over HTTPS, including full content, maintaining stable entry IDs, handling dates correctly, and leveraging self-links for caching and WebSub.
If you don’t have a feed yet I would highly recommend Atom. The specification has much less ambiguity, so you are less likely to have compatibility issues with the wide variety of clients in use.
- tjansen
As the author of an RSS reader, I would agree with most of that article, except the HTML / Styling section. It is full of misleading information.
1. You can use CSS, but expect that most readers will completely ignore it. Even widespread ones, like Feedly. Those that do support it will only offer a small subset, like text styles. No layout styles (positioning or flex-layouts), often not even colors. If you want to try the capabilities of your reader, this is a test feed: https://test-rss.downread.com/styles.rss.xml
2. Don't just prefer inline CSS, use it, because any sane RSS reader will filter <style>.
3. Yes, semantic elements will generally work. And not only those listed: also things like <table>, <figure>, and sometimes <aside>.
4. Agree about JavaScript. Don't use it.
5. Decent readers will support <video> and <audio>. But <iframes> are even better, as long as you use common providers, especially YouTube. Embeds from X, Instagram, and Facebook are also relatively widely supported.
6. Agree about forms. At best, they will be used as rendering hints, but forms won't work.
- xyzsparetimexyz
1. Have a RSS feed
2. Don't get rid of it
Sadly Twitter, reddit and many other sites have violated these for years.
- talideon
I would add to this that tag URIs (see RFC 4151) are a fantastic way to mint entry IDs.