A Visual Guide to Atom

Think of this website as a tutorial / guide to the Atom Publishing Protocol. You can use the menu on the left to dive into the tutorial, find resources / references, or contact me with questions and improvements.

Just so you can get a feel for what this guide is about below shows a very simple Atom Entry being posted to a URI. The header is highlighted and the sample Atom Entry is shown in its entirety. More colors will show later in the tutorial to depict Required, Optional, and Ignored Atom Entry elements. 

POST /url/entries HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
User-Agent: SomeAgent/1.0
Content-Type: application/atom+xml
Content-Length: nnn

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title>
  <id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
  <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
  <author><name>John Doe</name></author>
  <content>Some text.</content>
</entry>
Color Coordination

One of the most key elements for a Visual guide is use of color. I am going to try to relate color and purpose in the code samples that I provide. This way when you see a certain tag or section of text in a certain color you know will immediatly know the most critical information about how, when, and where to use that data. Here is the list of colors: 

Header - Browser Requests and Server Responses
Required - Entry Elements Required for Inserts or Updates
Optional - Entry Elements that are Optional for Inserts or Updates
Ignored - Entry Elements that can be ignored by the Atom server