The
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards body has approved
the Atom 1.0 data syndication format as a “proposed
standard”.
Atom is a
potential rival to the increasingly popular RSS standard.
Both are designed
for publishing XML-based syndication feeds on websites and blogs,
to send headlines and summaries of new postings to Web users.
Weblogs and news
websites commonly use these feeds to send instantaneous headlines
and summaries of new postings and stories.
Google already
supports both Atom and RSS. An increasing number of media outlets
are using RSS to raise their advertising revenues by including ads
in the RSS feeds they send out from their sites.
The IETF’s Atom
technical details are available here:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-11.txt