While working on my static site generator, Lifer, I was occasionally annoyed by how my test feeds were being read by RSS feed readers. And I was occasionally annoyed at the rss Ruby gem source code for generating XML tags in my feeds that I wasn’t explicitly specifying. Chris Wellons’s Atom vs. RSS blog post expresses the same feelings of surprise I felt when digging deeper into the ancient history that is the Atom and RSS 2.0 specifications.