Mark has posted a really excellent explication of the Atom API, a REST weblog publishing api built on top of the Atom XML weblog format. (but you knew that) Do I think Atom will “kill”, replace or otherwise make RSS 1.0 irrelevant? No, I don’t even think its trying to address the same scope of problems. Do that makes Atom uninteresting, not at all.

And I think the work going into the Atom API is the most interesting part. Watching this evolve I think we’re starting to see real broad based understanding, and work going into webservices, and particularily RESTful ones, which haved tended to be the province of theory geeks. (the same people sort of people who like RDF :) Its certainly the first time I’ve had a chance to watch a webservice evolve ala open source, in public, so you can learn from the descision making process, to scratch an itch so its real world, and interatively responding to community feedback. This does more make to webservices accessible then all the hundreds of “a baby example of using the Soap library in Java C# etc” articles in the world. Kind of like RSS did for XML.

Still hate the name, I think atom, I think nuclear, I think of the horrorifying crimes my government has committed abroad and at home in its scramble to to the top of the hill.

Seems to be some confusion about whether PHP can access custom Atom HTTP headers, it can from both my PHP 4.2.0 install running as CGI under Apache on Debian, and my PHP 4.3.2 install running as an Apache dso on OS X.

Off-topic, look at those sexy, sporty new URLs that both Simon and Mark are supporting these days.