On Feb 2, 2004, at 3:29 PM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

>   Is RSS 2.0 push or pull?  If pull,
> it's the safe bet.
>

Well, the whole point of RSS 2.0 [obligatory disclaimer -- I stay close 
enough to the food fight to be entertained, but not close enough to get 
dirty, so I may be missing something] was to support namespaces so that 
arbitrary extensions were possible.  I have no idea whether those 
extensions were geek push or customer pull, but it inevitably ran afoul 
of the "namespace thread virus," which led to a new round of the food 
fight, which led to Atom.

I'd guess that RSS 0.91 is the safe bet if customers are pulling for 
plain old ordinary news feeds.  Some of the ugly problems with it, such 
as escaping HTML with CDATA Sections, are still around in Atom, last I 
heard.

Joshua Allen says:

 > Why anyone who cared about RDF would abandon a perfectly good 
RDF-based
 > format in favor of a format that "might one day work great with RDF" 
is beyond me."

One reason might be that the convergence of the SemanticWeb/RDF 
foodfight and the RSS foodfight creates a Perfect Food Storm which any 
sensible person would stay away from :-)   Seriously, this is 
ultimately about politics and power  and personalities, not technology. 
  Anything one can say about the irrationality of it applies many times 
over to Windows vs Linux, XSDL vs RELAX NG,  .NET vs J2EE, C# vs Java, 
WSDL vs REST, XAML vs XUL, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.  Why should paying 
customers care about any of that?  Lots of reasons, not all of them 
good, but not all of them bad.