Aaron Brazell has a to-the-point explanation of why people don't understand RSS, and why they probably don't "want it." To wit:

RSS is not mainstream because it?s XML and XML by its nature is unforgiving. If anyone expects to invent a protocol/standard and want widespread uptake, the barrier to adoption must be low.

Beautiful. Now, from my old perspective of a search engine webmaster, I despised the fact that early HTML versions were so forgiving, and that HTML editors and generators took advantage of this fact and generated butchered code with mismatched or even unmatched tags. XML, like XHTML, is not so forgiving.

But this is a dilemma. I fully support XML's unforgivingness on one hand, yet have seen the problem it causes in feeds on the other hand. For example, as I keep adding feeds to my grazing list, I run across feeds that won't display because they have some character that should have been made into an XML entity using &#...;, where the ... is a 4-digit numeric code.

In the past, I've scanned the XML source code in a twitchy feed, found the problem, then emailed the publisher. I can only do this so many times, and don't do it anymore.

The problem really is that the web feed toolset is still maturing. RSS editors and generators should automatically convert all characters to their entity equivalent as necessary. This part should be transparent. It's why I've said in past months, RSS may have it's greatest adoption in hardware, which makes it completely transparent - the way it's currently transparent in customized home page sites like My Yahoo!, etc.

Either that, or more browsers need to intrinsically know what to do when someone clicks on a feed's link. Because if they don't know what RSS is, they won't otherwise know what to do with that link except click it. This possibly means we need a new XHTML tag which explicitly indicates a feed link, regardless of its format.

Until that happens, RSS will still probably be most widely used transparently by My Yahoo! types of subscribers. And the more I think about it, does it really matter if people know they are using RSS? Aaron's article links to Devin Reams, who suggests that maybe changing RSS' name will not make a difference if RSS does not behave in a more acceptable manner in browsers. As Brian Clark at Copyblogger said:

The way to sell RSS is to tell people why it?s better than email for them.

What do you think? What can we do as evangelists or early adopters to spread the use of RSS/ Atom?

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/