comparing Atom for the web services web with HTML for the document web is something i like to do. HTML is a really bad document format on many different levels. it is not great at anything. but it is great in allowing so many different things to be expressed in at least some way, and it is great because it allows misuse/specialization in a variety of ways. it is of course often painful to see how HTML is being (mis)used, but it is exactly this ability of HTML to be used in so many different ways that gave us the web and the tremendous value of so much content being crammed into this one container format. many bad things happen along the way, but many good things as well.

personally, my prediction is that Atom will go a route similar to that of HTML: most people using it will not care so much about how it “should be used in a perfect world”, they will just use it and clients will have to deal with it. and if you’re good at dealing with it as a client, you will have access to a set of resources which otherwise simply would not be available.