Keith Devens .com

I'm replying here because I couldn't find a comment box at the whump site. All I could see was a manual trackback box. I'm on lynx, if that makes a difference.
Could somebody explain to me the raison d'etre of RSS? As I understand it, webloggers could just agree on a standard set of XHTML tags to mark-up their weblogs and have aggregators parse that. Is it for the size savings? XHTML is pretty minimal, if you use it wisely. And aggregators pull web pages much more often than the daily visit or two.
Maybe I'll invent a new syndication format. I'll call it QSS (Q comes below R). It'll have a link to an XSLT style sheet that converts it to RSS, which will have a link to another XSLT style sheet to convert it to XHTML, which can display in browsers.
Not to mention PSS, OSS, and so on. Is my point valid? Unnecessary abstraction?

RSS is just an agreed-upon format for news syndication. It makes sense for a bunch of reasons to have it be distinct from your HTML (or XHTML) web pages.

Mark Pilgrim has covered this in depth.

Informative link, thanks Keith.

Mark's arguments seem to boil down to two good points:

1. XHTML has been let loose, would be too hard to tame, so we need a new syndication standard.
2. Web page content may be different from feed content.