FWIW, This is by Manton Reece and Brent Simmons. And Simmons is known (among other things) as the creator of NetNewsWire which has been around for more than 15 years. He does know a bit about Atom and RSS feeds.
Ok, I have no idea who these guys are so forgive me being rude: if they're so good then why did they not address those points? to my eyes, op makes a solid argument. I'd like to know their side of the story.
> Badly formed XML? Check. There might be badly formed JSON, but I tend to think it'll be a lot less likely.
The problem with XML is mostly that it is a very complex format so the bugs are more probable and there are more pitfalls.
> Need to continually poll servers for updates? Miss. Without additions to enable pubsub, or dynamic queries ...
They actually did add tags to enable WebSub (previously called pubsub) so there goes that. For the other concerns, I think it is not the formats job to care for partial or incomplete data. Nothing prevents you to have a dynamic link with a "updatesSince" on your webpage and serve all of the articles that were added or updated after that. Nowhere, the format specifies the limit on number of items. It also incorporates paging out of the box so you could bubble up any old articles.
> Complete understanding of modern content types besides blog posts? Miss.
The point of this is for the open web, by definition nobody can anticipate all formats. Rather than fill the spec with tweets, facebook and other types, they have opted for the least common denominator and added a specific way to add extensions. This makes way more sense.
* An understanding that separate but equal isn't equal. Miss.
Nothing actually prevents you to leave the content fields blank and rely on the reader to pull the format. But for this kind of usage there are other methods. Personally I prefer content delivered in the RSS precisely to avoid to have to deal with customization of content formatting. JSON feed HAS a way to specify formatting though, it's called HTML tags. No need to reinvent the wheel here.
I don't agree with most of what you wrote, but the "it's called HTML tags" is the most wrong. You must not have tried this any time in the past 5 years or so. The embedded tags come out of CMSs and - when they're not stripped completely - look like <div class="title-main-sub-1"> and <span class="sub-article-v5-bld">. HTML isn't used alone, it's always used with CSS nowadays, and no matter if semantic tags are best practice, the fact is it's optional and regularly not used. If they're going to create a new standard format, they need to address this.
What is the difference between re-publishing the content in some other format which will do formatting well and re-publishing the content using sensible html tags with maybe some embedded minimal stylesheet?
There might be mis-use and abuse, but if you want to avoid that you can always push markdown into the "text" representation.
One has to wonder whether Simmons is just trying to revive the old RSS ecosystem. "What do developers like these days, JSON? Let's do RSS in JSON!" ... This does not help.
The real challenge these days is to replicate the solutions Facebook and Twitter brought to feeds (bidirectionality and data-retention in particular) in a decentralised manner that could actually become popular. Simply replicating RSS in the data-format du jour is not going to achieve that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetNewsWire