Sheesh, you would think that an effort to clean up some of the more ambiguous areas of RSS would be getting Kudos. Instead, we have Dave Winer and his consistent inability to work with others:

It concerns me to see five companies, Newsgator, SixApart, SocialText, Feedburner and Technorati, give themselves special position among the many companies using RSS, especially since UserLand unilaterally gave up its special position with respect to RSS. It seems to me this is an issue that should be discussed publicly.

That's right Dave - those small companies are going to ruin the universe as we know it. We had some sensible reaction from Sam Ruby, who said (in part):

Being allowed to clarify the specification is one thing. Whether or not others feel like Nick does is yet another. In the long run, the success of the work currently under the working title of RSS 2.0.2 depends little on what Harvard thinks, but instead depends very much on what people like Nick and companies like Microsoft actually do.

The leadership that Rogers is providing has been exemplary. I’ve been quietly aligning the Feed Validator RSS 2.0 test cases to track to the drafts that he has produced. I believe this work is important and should continue.

That resulted in a pathetic cry for attention from Steve Gillmor:

I've developed a new spray that detects b*******. I can't talk too much about the technology until the product launch, but I will demonstrate its usefullness by spraying it on this post by Sam Ruby:

I thought everything was about Dave, but apparently, the stuff that isn't is about Steve.

Now, back in the day, when Atom was first being talked about, I was pretty darn hostile. This was back before I really understood what a complete jerk Dave Winer is, and how utterly impossible he is to work with. The Atom group had a lot of discussions that looked trivial, but they moved the ball forward and worked on some of the problems that just cannot be addressed in RSS - due to the complete lack of understanding shown by Winer. Over time, here's how it's going to fall out. The name RSS will stick - it's become generic, in the same way that the term "Kleenex" has. However, most people doing serious work in the field will use Atom. At least there, they'll find a group of people who's first thought isn't to deny the possibility of problems.