Various debates about RSS (Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) have been happening for a while. I think the main side-effect of this bothering me at the moment is the lack of an agreed standard for escaping in RSS descriptions and/or requiring that those description be well-formed XHTML.

Tim Bray has an excellent summary of this issue in his RSS Needs Fixing, from April. He also mentions the absence of support for relative URIs, which absence I think is pretty lame.

Dave Winer is presently commenting on Moveable Type's RSS being non-standard. (Here is another older good post from Tim Bray on RSS and the S-word.) I agree with the sentiment that letting the RSS "agreement" fall apart would really suck, and turning that agreement into a "real" standard has to happen.

Norman Walsh also has an interesting post about RSS and RDF. (You may remember when I was blogging about some of these issues last month in RDF is in the air and its sequel, RDF Fever.)

But, the most interesting thing I have seen on all this is Ian Davis' recent post on Unified RSS, arguing that the RSS 1.0 (RDF) is best understood as a format for metadata about posts on a website, and RSS 0.92 and 2.0 are formats for distributing content. He suggests creating two (separate, but related definitions / standards): RSS Metadata (from the current RSS 1.0, which is RDF) and RSS Content (from the current RSS 2.0).

Ian's post is good stuff if you are interested in any of these RSS / RDF debates.