Frankly, except for the people developing the readers, the RSS/Atom distinction is completely irrelevant. RSS is used as a simplification for RSS/Atom.
I am actually developing a reader, so I know the differences. They're mostly minor, and I have to support both formats anyway, so I abstract most of them away.
Most are minor but Atom feeds explicitly state content type. This could be a security issue with RSS since there is no reliable way to guess between plain text or escaped HTML.
I am actually developing a reader, so I know the differences. They're mostly minor, and I have to support both formats anyway, so I abstract most of them away.