Given the fact that about 15 news aggregators currently support Mark Nottingham's Atom Syndication Format 0.3 (PRE-DRAFT) I'll be adding support for it to RSS Bandit this weekend. This won't be a big deal to implement relative to a number of other features Torsten and I have in mind. As Brent Simmons wrote
This experience was a reminder for me of how unimportant the underlying syndication formats are, in a way. What percent of time does an aggregator developer spend on RSS and Atom parsing code? 50%? 25%? 10%? I figure it’s somewhere less than 1%. The rest of the time is taken up with things like data storage, networking, and user interface. But mostly user interface. Not just implementing—which is often easy—but designing user interface, which is difficult.
This experience was a reminder for me of how unimportant the underlying syndication formats are, in a way. What percent of time does an aggregator developer spend on RSS and Atom parsing code? 50%? 25%? 10%?
I figure it’s somewhere less than 1%.
The rest of the time is taken up with things like data storage, networking, and user interface. But mostly user interface. Not just implementing—which is often easy—but designing user interface, which is difficult.
In other RSS Bandit news Torsten is almost done with some code that fixes our #2 performance problem in RSS Bandit and Phil Haack has started work on official RSS Bandit documentation. Excellent work.
All of the above should show up in the next RSS Bandit release. Phil's documentation will most likely reside on the RSS Bandit Documentation Page on SourceForge and will be linked to from the RSS Bandit help menu.