Couldn’t agree more about the frustration that Atom 1.0 isn’t included. I’ve never gotten an answer as to why, either.
It’s sad, really. I expected better, though I’m not sure why. Wordpress has followed the same trajectory as so many others before it. In the beginning we all bubbled with enthusiasm over abstract concepts like “web standards” and “accessibility”. We were determined to set a new baseline, to draw a line in the sand and say, “Those bad old days of invalid markup and layout tables are over! A new day has dawned, and from this day forth, we will accept nothing less than valid XHTML, CSS, and Section 508!”
Then, slowly, over time, the daily grind of supporting an ever-growing and ever-more-demanding community takes its toll. There are sleepless nights fixing security holes, and chasing down obscure platform-specific version-specific phase-of-the-moon-specific bugs, and dealing with community malcontents. New standards emerge, and we’re surprised to find that we aren’t as enthusiastic as we expected to be about supporting them. “What’s wrong with the way we’ve always done things?” we hear ourselves ask. The enlightened among us at least acknowledge that this is the same attitude, perhaps the very same question, that those we overthrew so long ago asked themselves. “Why should my HTML validate? Layout tables work in every browser. What’s wrong with the way we’ve always done things?” But now we’re the ones who are set in our ways. “But it’s new… and improved… no, really. I made an S5 presentation to explain why.” “Go away kid, the feed validator is dead to me. Can’t you see we’re busy here?”
And so it is that products, and the communities around them, ossify around a certain set of standards — those that were in vogue when we were young, and enthusiastic, and starry-eyed about the very idea of standards. We become increasingly out of touch with the needs of our own community. And someday, sooner than we realize, the rising star of tomorrow will emerge from the ashes of the flamewars of today. That kid with stars in her eyes and an S5 presentation on her laptop turns out to be a bit of a programmer herself, and the cycle begins again. “What does she have that we don’t have?” we scoff, but it’s too late. The cycle has already begun, and this time it doesn’t revolve around us.
— Mark 
Whatever. Wordpress is cutting edge and you know it. Heck, wordpress.org is XHTML 1.1. You have to admit that’s awesome.
— Jeff
Where by awesome you mean “supporting the appearance of adhering to standards, without actually following them?” XHTML FAQ, item 15.
Pretty sure he was kidding. Really hope he was kidding. So hard to tell these days.
— Mark
If only I’d had the sense to see that he’s bent WordPress to his will, and is using it to produce lovely, lovely HTML 4.01, I could have shared a knowing smirk, instead of slapping another YHBT sticker on my forehead.
They’re checking in Atom 1.0 support into WordPress 2.2, which is due out by summer.
We become increasingly out of touch with the needs of our own community. And someday, sooner than we realize, the rising star of tomorrow will emerge from the ashes of the flamewars of today.
Mark, go get yourself a stiff drink. Talk like that makes me worry that you’re going to go radio silent again. ;-)
Ken, I don’t see anything at those links that would convince me that Wordpress 2.2 will be any less of a disappointment than Wordpress 2.1, Wordpress 2.0, or Wordpress 1.6.
— Mark
Gee, would not like to see what the post/comments might be like, if um maybe it was software that you actually paid for. Give me a break. Get an Atomizer!
— Peggy
$ telnet wordpress.org 80
Trying 72.232.44.122…
Connected to wordpress.org.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET /development/ HTTP/1.1
Host: wordpress.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4
X-Pingback: http://wordpress.org/development/xmlrpc.php
Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: LiteSpeed
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 04:49:40 GMT
Connection: close
1000
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”>
<head>
….
— Chaz
> if um maybe it was software that you actually paid for
— Mark
Oops. Yes, sorry. I didn’t know you paid for it. My bad. Carry on then.
— Peggy
It’s interesting to reread Freedom-0, in light of your current disgruntlement.
The point of that essay was that — if you didn’t like the direction a particular project was going, or if development stopped, or if it continued, but the developers decided to take the project commercial — you could always fork the project. And that this ability to fork trumped all other considerations.
So… you gonna fork WordPress? Or are you gonna write an APP export script, and take your data elsewhere?
So… you gonna fork WordPress?
He certainly can, but Habari looks promising.
— Sam Ruby
I was kidding, in case there is still any doubt. And my site is actually generating pseudo-HTML 4.01, because you’ll get one of those amazing “HTML-compatible” /> empty tags every once in a while. I’m writing something new, but considering just using 1812 instead.
— Jeff
Really, why would you actually expect any different? The lead kid is probably still whining over feed validator. Somewhere along the line – they started convincing themselves that because Aunt Millie doesn’t really care about Atom version X vs Atom version Y vs. Dave’s pet text output format that it meant that they were serving Aunt Millie best with GUI text input instead of making sure that they were building on a standards base.
Oh well, life goes on. And they’ll be a nice footnote in Wikipedia or Wikipedia’s replacement one day.
(full hypocritical disclosure: I’m still a Wordpress user, mostly out of my own sloth and laziness, and really, my 6.5 estimated readers don’t care. But I’m not sure how long I’ll stay, at some point even the users of it have to stand for something)
One can always give them another chance to redeem themselves and vote up the Ideas forum topic about rolling it in.
He certainly can, but Habari looks promising.
Sam, why not just submit a patch or plugin to the WordPress team to implement some Atom 1.0 functionality into WordPress? Wouldn’t this be a better approach than just bailing entirely?
You mean like these patches?
The standard open source retorts (“file a bug,” “submit a patch,” etc.) don’t work here. We do not suffer from a lack of bugs filed, or patches submitted, or code reviewed.
— Mark
Feeling lucky, Ken? Top Google result for Wordpress “Atom 1.0″ patch is the WordPress bug tracker. It’s not like nobody’s tried.
So… you gonna fork WordPress?He certainly can, but Habari looks promising.
Perhaps it does.
My only point was that the open-source nature of WordPress confers little benefit if, ultimately, one finds oneself, “reluctantly,” migrating one’s data to another blogging platform.
There are other factors, besides the ability to fork the project, that turned out to be rather important.
Guys, thanks for the links. Interesting and weird to know that this has been overlooked for so long. For what it’s worth, more indications that WP 2.2 will include Atom 1.0.
Somewhat related: is the WordPress platform the most widely used implementation of Atom?
> is the WordPress platform the most widely used implementation of Atom?
I would guess that Blogger is the most widely used implementation, in terms of number of producers. There’s also LiveJournal, Vox, TypePad, Moveable Type, Google Groups, Flickr (use format=atom)… pretty much every publishing platform offers Atom. Most also offer one version or another of RSS, but I’ve long since given up complaining about the quality of people’s RSS feeds. :)
— Mark
A shuffling of files when we launched mu.wordpress.org accidentally un-included the header stuff, fixing it was a one-liner and I just did. An email or contact form would have had it done months ago. You don’t call, you don’t write… :)
(It’s not currently active for user-contributed parts of the site. I’ve fought that for countless hours, including few weeks about 100,000 blogs on WordPress.com were served as proper XHTML, but I don’t have any PHP code that can reliably and quickly avoid or fix XHTML errors in arbitrary crap content and around that time I also became really disillusioned with XHTML 1.1 and the direction of the W3C in general.)
Trunk WP is a bit saner now, check it out. Mark, I would love your feedback on it if you’ve got a few spare moments.
Next WordPress will buy a sports car and dye its hair.
— Matt