The drama around it is awkward, but I think Winer has a point about the success of RSS being at least partially attributable to it not changing. The immediate a

The drama around it is awkward, but I think Winer has a point about the success of RSS being at least partially attributable to it not changing. The immediate analogy that springs to mind is email, also archaic, also widely adopted, you don't have to fear that there will be breaking changes or some company will decide it's going away tomorrow. You just use it and it works. (RSS actually had that apocalyptic moment when Google Reader shut down, did it die? Nope.) The net result is that RSS is low maintenance, the implementations out there are stable and have been around for years, very little work needs to be done on code which deals with RSS, millions of websites continue using it and no one has to lose any sleep over it. Not that I wouldn't like to see any improvements at all. It would be nice if these guys could set aside their differences and say look, we'll do an update of some kind and increment the major version by 1, say, every 10-15 years. Yes that's practically glacial in Internet time, maybe that's actually good.