how many versions of RSS / Atom should one support?

[yawnmoth]

I recently saw a phpBB modification that presented feeds in RSS 0.91,
RSS 1.0, RS 2.0, and Atom 1.0. In contrast, sites like wikipedia
(when viewing article history) only seem to offer one version of RSS
and one version of Atom. Digg only offers one version of RSS (2.0).

My question is... just how many versions of RSS / Atom should one try
to support? Is this phpBB modification overkill? Is Digg not
providing enough options?

 

[Andy Dingley]

My question is... just how many versions of RSS / Atom should one try
to support?

2 or soemtimes 3: Atom 1.0 (because it works), RSS 1.0 (because it's
still the best for sophisticated intranet apps, owing the RDF model),
RSS 2.0 (because you still sadly need it to drive podcasts). RSS 1.0
isn't particularly useful unless you're really _using_ it, and in RDF.

RSS 0.92 is now obsolete. The "compatibility" argument for supporting
it a few years ago has now been supplanted by RSS 2.0.

All the other variants are dead meat, most obviously 0.91, 0.93 etc.
as they're merely minor variants of the main development streams.


Internally I always process feeds as RSS 1.0 (with Jena). Down-
conversion is easy.