Parsing RSS is a hassle. The specification never made it clear if you could include HTML or not---did you entity encode the HTML? Strip it out so it's only pl

Parsing RSS is a hassle. The specification never made it clear if you could include HTML or not---did you entity encode the HTML? Strip it out so it's only plain text in the feed? The original designer of RSS, Dave Winer, never clarified that point, nor did he want to. In fact, he got downright nasty when a group did clean up the specification and released it as RSS 2.0. That lead to the development of Atom, to clarify these issues and remove Dave Winer from the discussion. So there are at least three different RSS standards, most of which are under specified as to what is and isn't allowed. It's like the tag soup of XML.