In some ways RSS could be accused of being the Emperors New Clothes of standards – the acronym has more than one meaning (including the Hindu Nationalist one), there are multiple versions, extending it via modules makes its use as generic as XML itself, and if you normalize the data flowing around in RSS, then the lowest common denominator is some text with a link surrounding it – hardly metadata, more like hypertext links. But to some extent, all standards are like the Emperors New Clothes in that they are not so much about specs and technical precision, but the virtual mindset that they occupy and the people and tools that use them. To this end, RSS is a winning meme, people outside of the grass roots weblog community are starting to talk about and use it and RSS 2.0 passes the good enough test (with a couple of tweaks IMHO) for applications beyond headline syndication.
There are many things that (Not)Atom is doing that are absolutely necessary and very good from a technical perspective, but from a market perspective, surely it would be better if Atom worked around a core of RSS and if need be then the RSS 2.0 core should be amended to include necessary things like the encoding type of content.
A year or so ago the name actually wasn’t important, but now RSS is: 1. on the radar of the content management companies, Vignette, Interwoven, Documentum; 2. being output within services from hubs such as AOL; 3. being syndicated by media organizations such as the BBC.
In as much as weblogs are more important than online journals – that they show the way that information can be published, re-purposed, re-routed and re-formatted to be viewable on any networked device in real-time, anywhere and searchable with SQL-like precision using metadata encoded in XML, then the standards for weblog publishing, syndication and change notification are important for how things will be published and searched on the web. If everything on the web were published using the emerging weblog method then the web would be searchable like a database and return anything as soon as it was available. Google will never be able to do this by crawling the web.
There is a risk that if RSS has captured mind-share outside of the weblog community then Atom, without an RSS payload, may be perceived as a weblog only format, if only because people outside of the this community will be confused.