The Atom syndication format is defined at www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-11.txt>. It is finalized, and should become an RFC soon.

For an introduction, see “An overview of the Atom 1.0 Syndication Format” at www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-atom10.html>

For a comparison of Atom and RSS, see www.tbray.org/atom/RSS-and-Atom>

To parse Atom feeds, use Syndication::Atom::Parser.

The earlier Atom 0.3 format is partially supported; the ‘mode’ attribute is ignored and assumed to be ‘xml’ (as for Atom 1.0).

Base64 encoded data in Atom 1.0 feeds is not supported (yet).