Let's say that, for some stupid reason, I'm thinking of implementing Yet Another Blog-Aggregator-Type Thingy that I want to work with most blogs and syndication feeds that exist today. Which formats do I need to support? RSS 0.91? RSS 1.0? RSS 2.0? Atom? Others?
(I know I probably also want to support OPML for importing a list of feeds as well.)
At work, for example, all our stuff is generated as Atom only; my web site is also Atom only; but there are a lot of other sites that generate RSS 2 only.
FWIW, Adobe Media Player implements support for Atom, RSS 2.0, and other flavors of RSS, but we find that the first two cover a large majority of active feeds today.
Having done this very thing myself for a dozen or so feeds, I can tell you that the problem is not so much 'which RSS version' as 'why the hell can't they actually comply with the version they chose?' Something like Perl's XML::RSS can at least attempt to parse most of what you throw at it, but Atom is handled by a separate stack of modules. Plus, you probably don't want to do this in Perl anyway.
This is going to be a Flex/AIR thingy, so it's going to be ActionScript. Groveling XML is pretty easy in AS with E4X (an XML query minilanguage that's a syntactic extension to AS), and I don't need to pull too much deep stuff out of the RSS/Atom for what I'm doing, so hopefully it won't be too bad...
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