Well, that’s a blast from the past.
I hand-rolled an atom feed for my statically generated blog. It’s a reasonable, easy format to work with.
First iteration of Google's APIs were atom. I do miss XML.
One of the API providers I use at work returns responses in XML and we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect.
What do you like about XML? I feel like I'm missing something.
I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? Is JSON is a much less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
what is old is new again?
No, this is just old.
Pity though. RSS / Atom was a fantastic concept and it’s a real pity big tech killed them off.
Nothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.
Agreed. That nowadays people or even big companies find it outside their core competency to host their blog, have atom/RSS feeds is not because big tech killing it.
Meh. Big tech didnt kill it off, it was already dead at that point. Sometimes things just arent popular no matter how much we might want it to be.
Google Reader was uber popular at a time, then Google decided that syndication of articles, with comments, had to be an exclusive feature of their Facebook-esque Google+.