Good resource for the ATOM and RSS specification?

Question

I've been trying to find the "official" documentation for ATOM and RSS so I can program against it. The problem I'm running into is that there are a lot of places that includes parts but never the whole specification.

Does anyone know of a good reference for both of these syndication formats thats reliable and contains the whole specification?

UPDATE: I did find this one for ATOM. Not sure if this is official but it looks pretty promising. I'm going to read some more on it.

Answer 1

The official RSS 2.0 spec is here:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

I am the author of the spec.

Answer 2

The official Atom spec is here:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287

Answer 3

See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 for the official Atom Syndication Format specifications. Also, here are some more links I found useful:

• A good getting started guide to Atom 1.0 (Apparently this is the official home page but I found it lacking in detail as compared to the above link.)
• Comparison of RSS and Atom (You really should be using Atom 1.0 for new feeds).
• Validate your Atom feed.
• PubSubHubbub (A way for users to subscribe to changes in your feed and your site to publish changes to the feed).
• Building Atom Feeds for ASP.NET MVC (Although this is for MVC, it's still worth a read to learn about PubSubHubbub, icon and logo sizes and more about Atom feeds).

Answer 4

The latest official version of the RSS spec is here: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

The current version is 2.0.11 published on March 30, 2009. The above link will always point to the latest version, and there are links to archived versions on that page.