What is the difference between RSS and ATOM?

If you understand the term web feeds, you should know that Atom and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) are two formats of web feeds. Although there are two versions of RSS, RSS 2.0 is the newer version. It was released to improve on some of the limitations of RSS 1.0. Similarly, Atom, being a more recent web feed format compared to RSS, was released to improve on some of the shortcomings of RSS. One of the ways to differentiate between the two is by comparing the types of content supported by both RSS and Atom. In this regard, Atom supports more content types compared to RSS, including the ones that are not supported by RSS. For instance, the Atom supports both HTML and text, whereas RSS does not HTML. Atom can be described as a more flexible web feed format compared to RSS; the reason is that, unlike the latter, the former can also recognize RSS documents.

RSS or Really Simply Syndication and ATOM are both standards for web feeds, although RSS is usually considered as the older of the two. RSS is very difficult to deal with and it can be confusing at times. However, ATOM was designed to improve on all the limitations of RSS, and that is why ATOM has been able to overtake RSS as the real standard for web feed.

ATOM is usually considered as an IETF standard making it easier to use compared to RSS. In the case of ATOM, the format will be well differentiated as you will be able to figure out the language used in the content.

In contrast, the RSS does not offer this feature meaning the format of the content will not be declared explicitly and clearly. Another difference between the two which also doubles as the advantage of ATOM over RSS is that the code of the former can still be used with other XML vocabularies, while the code of the latter cannot be used for XML vocabularies.

RSS and ATOM are two types of web feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This is the standard for web feeds. For some users, it can be confusing due to it having a scattered development. This is why an alternative was created, which is ATOM. ATOM stands for ATOM syndication format.

It has a IETF standard, which is an advantage it has over RSS. Another difference between them is number of elements that each have. RSS has 30 elements, while ATOM only has 20 elements. These elements are important in creating things like titles and descriptions, as well as links to the feed.

RSS simply stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it was considered to be the standard for web feeds for quite some time. Due to the scattered development of the RSS, it uses a nonstandard and often confusing convention, which is not really of an advantage. As a response to amend this design error in RSS standard, ATOM was invented. ATOM came and was considered an IETF standard, which is a major advantage it has over RSS.

The ATOM actually had to implement some features that made the IETF format easier to deal with. The ATOM feed, in addition, declares the format of the content and the language used, while it is left for the browser to differentiate between which is used as RSS feeds do not contain the declaration of contents, but it contains escaped HTML or plain text. RSS code is not really usable in other XML vocabularies.