I've decided that one of the more enjoyable things in this computing life is watching fights between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer. For what it's worth, I'm with Mark in the debate.
I dropped so-called RSS 2.0 (and 0.9x) from this site a long time ago. One of the main reasons why is that I was frustrated with the abuse of the description element. Some people like to write their weblogs in short little snippets. There's rarely a need to fill in a separate description element there. Others prefer writing short (or even long) articles. On the other side, some people prefer to read entire entries in their desktop RSS reader while others like to see short entries and prefer to keep an eye on general trends and go directly to entries they find interesting. I myself do a mixture: I run NetNewsWire on my desktop, but also keep an eye on sites like Python Programmer Weblogs which are mass topical aggregators, and obviously can't display long-winded posts (well, it can, but wisely doesn't).
RSS continues to be strange, especially since Winer co-opted it and made it into RSS 2.0, a weekend project that really didn't make the spec (all the 0.9x versions of it) all that much better. It didn't take into account the different uses of RSS. BBC News deploys a nice RSS 0.91 feed - just titles and descriptions, linking back to the full article. This is how big news sites use RSS, and it's all they really seem to need. It works nicely into portal style sites (which, I believe, RSS was initially made for when Netscape wrote it) to let you see current headlines from various sources. That's very different from the weblog and personal RSS newsreader world, where I doubt there's a consensus over just what the RSS acronym means (Remote Site Syndication? Really Simple Syndication?).
I really like that Atom formally goes after the weblog market - trying to take care of both the authoring and distribution angle (which is nice, because the XML-RPC API's are annoying and a subject that I'm not going to go back into... Suffice it to say that Dave Winer, as usual, under-specced XML-RPC to be a neutered protocol). It deals with how to encode and deploy the HTML content of weblog posts, separate from the description (granted, you can do this in RSS by using the 'content' namespace/module, as I do in my RSS 1.0 feed, but the Atom way is nicely integrated into the core spec). And I like that Atom is a community spec that has (so far) seemed to avoid the problems that plague many internet spec:
In any case, the dialog between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer is certainly enterntaining.