[pferde]

RSS's (and Atom's) problem is not using XML, it's the woeful ly vague, and overly forgiving specification.

As someone who has written a parser library and a RSS reader program, I can tell you that it is an endless battle of users always reporting yet another feed that is "breaking your RSS reader".

When investigating why the feed does not work well, you always end up finding yet another way how a site can implement RSS/Atom badly while still following the letter of the specification.

I love the idea of RSS/Atom and the possibilities they allow, but hate the actual specs.

[chrismorgan]

I don’t feel it’s fair to say that about Atom. RSS, sure; it’s a total disaster. And that’s kinda why Atom was made, and it seems to me to do a good job.

So given that, any chance you could elucidate on fault you find with Atom?

[pferde]

Yes, you are right, most of my grievances were against RSS - either old RDF, or RSS 2.0, or perhaps against Atom 0.3, which was not all that common before much better Atom 1.0 took over.

Still, I vaguely recall that there was at least one vagueness in the Atom 1.0 spec that I found abused in a real world feed, but can't for the life of me remember it - it's been a while.

[chrismorgan]

Now if only podcast players would catch up to 2007 and support Atom.

[juped]

Yes, they are not very good specs, but frozen bad (cf. Unix) has benefits.