RSS is an awful mess. Atom was invented in significant part to fix the problems of RSS (things like the content encoding disaster), and it succeeded. Except tha

RSS is an awful mess. Atom was invented in significant part to fix the problems of RSS (things like the content encoding disaster), and it succeeded. Except that, while everyone else accepted it (most things use Atom rather than RSS, admittedly with a few rather notable and massive holdouts), the podcasting industry ignored it. The way RSS and especially podcasting RSS just pulls in bits and pieces from everywhere haphazardly, regularly ending up expressing the same thing three or four times, is an indictment against it. And if making <atom:link> mandatory doesn’t make you boggle (pulling in one element from the competing and superior standard, in what is at the very least a very mild abuse of the XML namespace—not that RSS cares about XML conventions on namespaces), nothing will.