RSS: Are All of These Different Versions Really Necessary??

I found the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters interesting. It was neat to see the other side of RSS, such as how to publish a feed, choose content and inform others about your feed. It all seemed pretty straightforward until I reached the section on format versions and modules. All of the different versions of RSS were thoroughly confusing to me! I still don’t really understand the difference between RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom and I found that the Wikipedia article just confused me even more. When I installed my aggregator and subscribed to my first few feeds, I was blissfully unaware of all of this techno mumbo-jumbo. I was just pleased that everything seemed to be working as it should. I remained unaware of any possible problems because, as Good notes, for now most aggregators read all of these different formats. It makes me nervous that she uses the term “for now.” What does this imply about the future of RSS?