Last year, there was some discussion of creating a profile for RSS to standardize its usage without changing the specification. From what I can tell, no profile was ever adopted--at least not by more than a few people. Had a profile been widely adopted, Atom would likely have received far less support.

No profile was widely adopted, Atom is growing, I've created Info Bite List. Is there a need for profiles today? I think so. I've just finished officially adding the concept of profiles to the Info Bite List specification. I've added a "profile" element which may be used to specify which profile or profiles a feed conforms to. This element will also be useful in the upcoming Info Bite API to request a feed in a format conforming to a particular profile, or one of a set of profiles. Also included in the specification is the concept of base profiles (complete profiles) and additive or subtractive profiles, which add or subtract elements from base profiles.

Could this get messy? Yes. But it could also provide the kind of flexibility needed to allow the market to decide on the proper baseline that software needs to support to interact in the real world.

Follow the link above to read the full details in the Info Bite List specification.