After all the sturm and drang over Atom, we come to this from Dave Winer:

The point? There were years of strife in the RSS world over this. In the end it took less than 24 hours, beginning to end, to support the new format. We could have saved all that angst. A new format isn't that big a deal.

The big rationale for Atom was cleaning up some of the holes in the RSS spec (which, at Dave's insistence, was frozen). Since then, the RSS spec has been interpreted (which amounted to closing most of the holes), and the end result is that RSS and Atom are completely interchangeable now.

I suppose most standards fights end up this way when you look back on them...

Technorati Tags: atom