Raw

I hear from Uldis and Harry there is talk of dropping RSS 1.0 support from WordPress. Here's my €0.02.

The "way too old" argument is empty. "It confuses the users" suggests that more work is needed on autodiscovery tools, not that the user's options should be reduced. The "RSS2 and Atom are both competent feed formats. All feed readers these days are built to understand one or both of them." argument isn't unreasonable as far as it goes. But it makes the assumption that what's offered by the different formats is the same, and should only be considered in the context of current syndication tools. I think that's a mistake, having the RSS 1.0 available means there is a direct RDF representation of the data. There is very active RDF development outside the syndication domain (e.g. this resource list or this), and for WP to cut the direct interoperability cord would be a retrograde step. Ok, RSS 1.0 may not be the ideal RDF representation - RSS 1.1 or an RDF/XML serialization of Atom/OWL would be preferable, primarily because they're both based on the revised RDF specs which avoid the ugliness of escaped HTML in content. But RSS 1.0 is supported by virtually every feed reader, and mass deployment of cleaner RSS RDF/XML isn't likely in the near future.

I don't really know why the WP folks are even considering removing RSS 1.0, their current source is reasonably well structured, and the inclusion of the corresponding template for RSS 1.0 is hardly significant bloat. All they'll really achieve is irritating a segment of the community.

Speaking personally, I'll echo one of Harry's points:

As a WordPress user, I like to have options. I want to be able to choose the format of RSS feeds that I publish. I don't want to be told what format is the "standard" format and what format is the "right" format.

For a while now I've had RSS 1.0 as my only feed format, because it simplifies the kind of experimentation I do.

One point I think that is worth making is that even if they did pull RSS 1.0 support, it wouldn't be the end of the world for Semantic Web applications of WordPress. The Atom format is generally sufficient to provide a good machine-processable representation of the data produced by WordPress, and deterministic mapping from Atom to RDF is possible (RSS 2.0 is less suitable because of the spec ambiguities, non-standard approach to resource (item) identification and broken content model). For any SemWeb-oriented system that consumes data from WordPress, the absence of RSS 1.0 isn't a showstopper. However for a developer working with SemWeb systems, they'll probably be considerably less likely to choose WordPress if it lacks any RDF support. To put it another way, I think the SemWeb community is in a position to say "Go on then, ditch RSS 1.0, see if we care…" ;-)

Ok, so now let's assume that supporting more than one syndication format is impossible. Which should remain? Here's a quick comparison of the main alternatives, assigning a value 1, 2 or 3 to various aspects, with 3 being the best. It is somewhat subjective, but note I am erring quite strongly in favour of RSS 2.0 by giving "Human-Legibility" equal weighting with "Not-Brokenness".

Make of that what you will.