I swore to myself I was not going to write anything more about the 2003 RSS Wars, but this section from Dave Winer’s RSS 2.0 Political FAQ was too good to pass up,
If we were to go the opposite way, with every source of feeds inventing their own replacements for core RSS 2.0 elements, the cost to enter would become increasingly high, and it becomes more likely that programs will express compatibility in terms of products, not formats. Then you’d have to use one aggregator to read BBC feeds, for example, and another to read SF Chronicle feeds. So “funky” is anti-interop; and “not funky” is pro-interop.
Okay, he has a point. Can you imagine, for instance, if you could only read the RSS feeds of something as important as the New York Times in just a single aggregator? That would really suck, wouldn’t it?
Thank goodness the anti-interop feeling in the RSS community is strong enough to prevent something like that from ever happening.