hAtom: The Death Of RSS?

Chris Messina spoke about microformats at BarCampBangalore. It’s a subject that I have been thinking quite a bit about lately. Specifically, I have been thinking about the hAtom microformat because of it’s relevance to my startup.

In general, microformats introduce a standard way of describing elements in a web page. Contact information can be described in a web page using hCard for instance. Applications that are aware of microformats can automatically make use of the described data in useful ways. An application can automatically get contact information where hCard is being used in a web page and store it in your address book.

hAtom removes the need to have a separate feed for content because the content becomes the feed. Users will no longer think that the web page is broken when they see the raw RSS feed by clicking on the familiar orange subscribe icons. Instead, they will be redirected to a more friendly page where they can choose to subscribe using their chosen readers much like what happens when a publisher uses Feedburner to manage their feed.

Microformats are disruptive, but they require both sides of the content to be participative. In other words, publishers and application developers must both choose to make use of microformats.