Tim Bray comments on the new round of RSS codification--he and Ben Trott enumerate all the good reasons--and points to Don Box's RSS 2.0 Profile as "a sensible stake in the ground."
Don's profile does not include content:encoded, and bans embedded markup in description--but includes xhtml:body for rich XHTML. That doesn't strike me as "rough consensus and running code"
--who's using xhtml:body? Who's using content:encoded?
My gut objection isn't justified, as you could still use content:encoded if you want; it's still valid RSS, it just doesn't fit this new profile thing. Also, reading Tim Bray's RSS Problems piece again makes xhtml:body sit a little better. If xhtml:body makes it into the profile, maybe readers will leapfrog content:encoded entirely in favor of xhtml:body. More RSS producers (I'm thinking Radio and Movable Type) would have to grow code to output valid XHTML. That's a lot of linting to do, though, as all the weblog tools I know of are based on text processing, and often let you put in HTML willy-nilly.
But of course there are good things. "[Tightening] up the citation-vs-permalink application"
of link as Don suggests is long overdue. Ben Trott said RSS 2.0's GUIDs should be required, and I can agree, and that's all Don's doing: asserting (like Joe Gregario) that that's what an item's link is supposed to be, in the case of a weblog. Fixing relative links is also A++.
Generally it's a nice direction to find RSS going.
