Thank you Brad, you have just single-handedly proved why we need a new vendor-neutral format. Last fall, when the feeds.archive.org/validator/ RSS validator came out, Dave praised it (and us) to high heaven.

Now, suddenly, apparently out of nowhere, that validator has become the "Mark and Sam" validator, which is therefore obviously evil. And a single vendor's proprietary closed-source validator, which hasn't been updated since the days of RSS 0.91 and which is so lax that it accepts and "passes" non-well-formed XML in some cases, is getting a new wave of attention.

And then here you come, telling the world that, really, neither of these automatic validation tools is good enough in the real world, because to be sure, you need one single person (who doesn't even work for that vendor anymore) to manually check your feed to be absolutely sure you've done everything right.

Which, by the way, you haven't. Didn't you hear? Dave just announced this morning that link should not be used for permalinks, despite the fact that it worked that way in 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, and even 2.0 before today (or maybe it didn't and he just didn't tell anyone, I haven't quite figured that out yet).

So thank you Brad. Thank you very much for proving exactly why we need a new vendor-neutral format. I couldn't have said it better myself.