WordPress.com

http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom

That was quick, eh? ;)

But seriously, hAtom will be meaningless to real people for a while yet. We're trying to help it along as "early adopters" and if anything cool starts happening with it we'll let you know.

@andy
Love the quick turn around. I already read wikipedia stuff thanks. What strikes me that h-atom may be cutting edge. It may elimnate the need for atom and rss feeds or am I off in the ozones on that? And if I'm not then that means a reduction on the expense side of the ledger, right? If so that would be more than kewl. Gotta go BBQ is ready to eat. Be back soon. :)

i'd have gone with chris's answer:

'will be' being the important part. it's part of the semantic web idea, meaning that eventually a computer will be able to actually understand and categorize information, rather than just finding keyword matches.

The hAtom microformat is not that ambitious. RSS and Atom have become fixtures and they will not be easily displaced. It'd be cool though, huh?

I have no effing clue what you guys are talking about. But ask me anything meaningless about Hollywood, I'LL KNOW IT! :) You know Carmen Electra's husband dumped her for Jenna Jameson? YES, this I know. But hAtoms I have no clue. I feel dumb. *sigh*

Have you ever looked at your Atom or RSS feeds on your blog? See how eveything is tagged to divide the title from the content, and so on?

What hAtom means is that the structural differences between the Atom feed and a regular page on your blog is less. hAtom essentially is adding extra info, with classes, to the markup.

So, this means that Technorati, for example, can just look at your regular blog page and get the same information it would from your Atom feed. The RSS or Atom feed is no longer necessary, because the same structure has been placed in the regular blog.

In the future, you may only need to "Subscribe to blog" and not "Subscribe to feed," if that makes sense.

However, like Andy said, that time is not yet upon us. It does mean, however, that hAtom is pretty cool.

Hope that helps.

YES, I do understand what's being addressed. And YES I did have it scoped out correctly. I'm betting over time that rss and atom links will become redundant and computers will actually be able to comprehend and sort information on any page. Holy guacamole - this is really hot stuff.
Thanks andy and thanks to the kamel too for bringing links to the oasis. As I keep reading and reading the baffling and over-lapping layers of information eventually small bright spots of comprehension shine through. I'm kicking myself that I did not start out on this cyber path years ago.
SIGH - there's so much to learn and I have no game plan - no syllabus. It's like wandering around in a library aimlessly and then just grabbing whatever book in whatever random order and in whatever foreign language and trying to make sense of it. %(
@nosy - I don't have a clue about who the people who are talking about are either.

Anything with the potential to eliminate RSS and Atom is fine by me. It makes no sense to me that every wordpress installation has to have half-a-dozen different types of feed just because a bunch of pointy-headed geeks are incapable of agreeing on a standard format. If we had a single standard, syndication would be mainstream by now.

Wank, I'd love it if blogs were published in such a way that parallel feeds were not needed. It can be done (XHTML, XSLT, Xetera...) but the techniques are too complex; they won't kill RSS. Remember that there are millions of non-blog data feeds out there and the amount of RSS plumbing we never see is staggering.

Pointy heads ? :)

It seems odd that anyone would pull out a 6 month old resolved thread without asking a question. I started this thread last August and it was resolved on August 10th.

Odd? Nothing odd about reading an old thread.

Hey, something to blog about. :)

Can you or can you not bring up six month old topics?
Any why is this in the CSS forum anyway?

Now if someone could only explain Yahoo Pipes...

something that combines a number of feeds into one so that scrapers will only have to go to one place?