Google Data

The Atom Publishing Protocol (aka AtomPub) is now a Proposed Standard Protocol from the IETF as RFC 5023. The Atom Working Group was formed in June of 2004 with the goals of producing a new syndication format and a new publishing protocol. The publication of RFC 4287 (The Atom Syndication Format) and RFC 5023 (The Atom Publishing Protocol) represent three years of effort by the members of the working group.

This is great news for us because the Google Data APIs are built on the Atom Publishing Protocol. The current Google Data APIs are based on early versions of the AtomPub specification and now that AtomPub is a Proposed Standard work will begin on getting all of our Google Data APIs compliant with RFC 5023. A big part of that work involves a lot of careful thinking about how to support the final version of the protocol and also support our existing clients. I'll talk more about our versioning strategy in a later blog post.

So what does "Proposed Standard" mean? That might not sound very stable - "Proposed" - but that term does have special meaning in the IETF. The best way to explain it is that there are plenty of other protocols that you use every day that are "Proposed Standards", for example: WebDAV, TLS, LDAP, SMTP, SIP, and IMAP. Of course, if you want to know more about the IETF's standards process, they have it documented, in RFC 2026