User can can discover a file described as "atom.xml" in the URL that can be copied and pasted into an aggregator to subscribe to the feed. It is much similar with RSS.
It has few differences with RSS or we can say the shortcomings of RSS are overcome in atom.xml.
- Atom was developed to be vendor neutral and freely extensible by any user; it is an "open standard."
- Atom lies within an XML-namespace.
- Atom includes "autodiscovery," allowing feed aggregators to automatically detect the presence of a feed.
- Atom differentiates between relative and non-relative URIs.
- Atom has separate "summary" and "content" elements.
- Atom explicitly labels a payload as plaintext or HTML .
- Each entry has a globally unique ID.
