Here it comes, another round in one of the ugliest, strangest standards-building processes ever, RSS 2.0.

I have been a fan of the idea of RSS for a long time, maybe since the beginning. It's just cool to make my links appear on your site in an automated way. The whole epic battle of RSS 0.9x vs. RSS 1.0 has been a disappointment. Lots of shady stuff back and forth.

I recently made an RSS 1.0 feed for this site, and it wasn't that hard. I created it by hand and namespaces didn't really bother me at all. However, I can think of a few reasons why RSS 0.9x people don't want to produce feeds in RSS 1.0:

1. The <rdf:Seq> thing means you have to loop through your set of <item>s twice, or process two clumps of data in one loop. Seriously, this bit of laziness is probably a big obstacle for RSS 1.0.
2. Why should I bother, when most tools are happy reading RSS 0.91 and I don't need any RDF features as included in RSS 1.0? In fact, I don't even need any 0.92 or 0.93 features. 0.91 does a fine job of handling what a lot of people want RSS to do for them.
3. If I decide to bother, the Dublin Core elements seem really vague and subject to interpretation when reading their documentation. Because they're generic, you have to look around to find how they're commonly used, and you're not sure if you're using them the way other people are. Sometimes it's good to say "this tag means exactly this, and if you use it any other way, you're wrong."

Another thing that many RDF and RSS 1.0 people miss is that the majority of people just don't give a whit about RDF. Sure, it's powerful, but so is a jet engine. Jet engines require a lot of maintenance and are more expensive to build and deal with than, say, a trolling motor on a boat. In many (obvious) cases, a trolling motor is more appropriate than a jet engine.

It would be nice if RSS 2.0 could bring together the 0.9x and 1.0 people, then provide decent tools and documentation for developers to use. Looking back over the history of RSS, this will be a big challenge.