I came across this post from Mark Nottingham on what RSS needs. I’ve written before about my conflicting feelings towards RSS, and I think having a body responsible for interoperability between feed readers as Nottingham suggests could address some of those issues; if there was a standard for handling footnotes and web components, for example. The web is a really rich publishing platform, and the only place the format is more denuded than RSS is email. Of course, this is also a feature of feeds: it can strip away distracting bloat from a web page so that it’s more accessible.

I think I’d really like to see feeds and syndication get the kind of attention that other protocols such as HTTP receive.