Many, if not most, pages now have more than one syndication feed. It is not uncommon to find RSS 0.91 next to RSS 2.0 next to ATOM 0.3 (and now ATOM 1.0 as well)—all on the same page! The idea is that the publisher is platform agnostic and therefore maximizes his audience. Sounds good, and in practice it works well, or at least it has worked well up until now. When the audience for Syndication feeds was entirely made up of techies and devs, the sea of acronyms wasn’t a problem—if anything it was even more inviting. Now however, as browser manufacturers build feed detection into the browsers, and more and more normal users are pushed towards the syndicated future, the breadth of format options only makes things more complicated, and therefore less attractive. For this reason Apple (and now Microsoft as well) has chosen to pick a single format out of the site the user is visting and use that when the user clicks on the Syndicate or RSS button.

How does Apple decide? It seems that they take the first the browser finds when reading the markup from top down. The odd, seemingly unintended consequence of this is that since ATOM starts with an A and RSS and RDF start with R’s, Safari almost always chooses the ATOM feed to use on pages that have multiple options. This situation is especially odd seeing as how Apple chose the decidely unpolitic “RSS” as the overall term they use for syndication over the web. Why snub ATOM only to support them with the browser’s feed autodetect scheme (my guess is that this is all unintended).

It seemed that Microsoft was going to make the same mistake (and they might still). In the channel9 video Robert Scoble did with the IE7 team right before Gnomedex, Scoble asked what the browser did when it hit a site with multiple feeds. The PM responded that it just took the first one it found, since that made it much simpler. While I have not yet had a chance to install and test IE7 beta1 myself, it would seem from screenshots that they ultimately decided to go the Firefox route of a drop down with the different options listed.

If you’re using Safari and have many feeds bookmarked like I do, check and see how many of them are ATOM. Aside from blogger-created or Google-operated sites, most out there offered both RSS and ATOM —are yours all ATOM like mine are?