I like Microformats. The potential for doing Really Useful Stuff with the internet is immense: Embedding events and contact information into regular (X)HTML pages, representing relationships and now, describing feeds.
At first glance, people might wonder what the point of the hAtom µF is. Every blogging CMS under the sun already offers content feeds, why duplicate the information? One massive, real-world advantage comes to those who aren’t using Wordpress: Comment feeds*.
Wordpress, for all its faults, has one very nifty feature: For every post you make, Wordpress will generate a feed of that post and its comments. If I comment on Fatty’s blog or Jo’s or Hanni’s, I can subscribe to an RSS2.0 format feed to get updates of the new comments that follow mine.
However, if I comment on John’s blog, Malarkey’s Stuff and Nonsense or CollyLogic, which run on TextPattern, Movable Type and Expression Engine respectively, I can’t subscribe to any comment feed. Those CMS don’t provide that feature.
The hAtom µF allows content authors using any CMS to create a per-post Atom feed, by including hAtom feed mark-up as part of their template. The page can be transformed using an XSLT Stylesheet into a standalone Atom 1.0 XML feed, subscribable like the best of them. With a bit of luck, services such as FeedBurner could even integrate hAtom support directly.
If people would take the time to adopt hAtom as it matures, comment tracking won’t be such a mashup of email notifications, feed subscriptions and Delicious bookmarking. Instead, it’ll just be one more thing to do with your feed reader.
If you want to experiment with hAtom, Luke Arno is running an hAtom to Atom proxy, and has said he’ll keep it up to date as the hAtom to Atom XSLT is updated.
*Of course, this is not the only use-case for hAtom. It’s got many other potential benefits to content syndication and interoperable mark-up of blog content. It just happens that Comment Tracking is my axe to grind at the moment, and it provides a detailed and practical example. I’m sure there are many new ideas that could be created off the back of more interoperable Blogs.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.