JSONFeed

The RSS 2.0.1 spec at https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html is essentially dead, or “frozen” / “settled” as it says there. 2.0.1 was published in 2003 and I don't expect to see a 2.0.2 or 2.0.3. The ambiguities you mention are real, though. “The url must be an http url” is one that feed validators would adhere to very strictly, for example, rejecting HTTPS URLs as invalid[1], which even caused Apple's Podcast submissions process to reject feeds with HTTPS URLs in them at one point (I was employed at the time by a company that hosted podcasts, and we had to work around it by rewriting URLs to use HTTP). I received a reply from the spec's author to my email suggesting they update the spec to clarify this (“of course you can use HTTPS”) but the spec itself was never updated and I would consider it unmaintained at this point. Atom and JSON F

They have closed issues that resulted in small changes to the spec: https://github.com/brentsimmons/JSONFeed/issues/11 I take your point that they're not addressed at the rate that issues come in, though.

In all honesty, “it's not XML” seems to be the main selling point. But that and the fact that it's on GitHub, which makes it more accessible to use and engage with for many developers, may be enough of a plus to embrace it. https://github.com/brentsimmons/JSONFeed I also find the spec much easier to read: https://jsonfeed.org/version/1 Beyond that they are similar and the mapping differences are described here: https://jsonfeed.org/mappingrssandatom

Absolutely agree about the MIME type. Someone filed an issue and created a pull-request for this after you wrote this comment. https://github.com/brentsimmons/JSONFeed/issues/22 https://github.com/brentsimmons/JSONFeed/pull/23 I hope they will merge it.