One thing I've wondered about Atom--why doesn't it use the same names as RSS for elements with the same purpose? For example, why call entries "entry" rather than "item"?

I know Atom is not RSS, and isn't pretending to be. I know Atom wouldn't be "backwards-compatible" with RSS even if some elements had the same...
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Continuing with the ideas of allowing the client to request only a subset of the elements contained in each item in the feed, and of allowing the client to request only new and/or updated items, the next idea is to allow the client to request one set of elements from new and/or updated items, and...
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I'll begin by echoing a suggestion that has been made elsewhere before: RSS needs a mechanism to request only items that are new or updated since a particular time. Now to expand on the idea and some of the issues it brings up...

First, in case this hasn't been mentioned before, it would be good...
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One of the big challenges facing RSS as is grows is the need to ensure that, with increasing numbers of subscribers, bandwidth requirements don't balloon out of control. RSS 2.0 begins to address this with the cloud subscription interface. Many opportunities remain for extending cloud or creating an API that could plug in to RSS...
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One thing that didn't catch my fancy in the Atom spec was the number of required elements for an Atom feed. For example, each entry (like an RSS item) in an Atom feed must contain both a "modified" date/time and an "issued" date/time. It may also contain a "created" date/time. If there is no "created",...
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After looking over the current draft of the Atom spec, I think they're definitely on the right track splitting the file format spec from the API spec. In RSS 2.0, the cloud interface is specified within the same document as the file format. While I almost agree that 2.0 is good enough to be frozen...
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One thing that surprises me about the RSS 2.0 specification is that, while there is an optional "image" element for the channel, complete with subelements for URL, title, link, width, height, and description, there is no image element for items. Instead, items have an "enclosure" subelement, with attributes for URL, length and mime type. While...
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If we begin from "info bite" and "info bite list", next we get "info bite reader", which abbreviates to "info biter", and finally ends up as a "biter" in common speech (like "world wide web browser", "web browser" and "browser"). "Info bite list" will probably end up shortened to "bite list".

So, what does "bite...
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As a developer of RSS tools, RSS aficionado, and man with an opinion or two, I suppose it's appropriate that I should have a blog about RSS. I named this blog "Info Bite" after one of my entries in Amy Gahran's contest to pick a colloquial name for RSS.

So, here's my campaign speech for...
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The dream blog in the right-hand column is displayed by Jawfish, a service which converts RSS newsfeeds to JavaScript, frames, or iframes, for display in web pages that can't run an RSS parsing script themselves.