Here's something that comes up all the time.

 

The author sub-element of item only allows an email address as its value.

 

This rule is routinely violated.

 

A couple of examples.

 

1. The new feeds for Yahoo-Groups. An example:

 

 

2. I violated the rules myself in the NY Times feeds. An example:

 

 

This question comes up regularly, and I counsel people to invent a new namespace and use an element from that space and give it the value that makes sense. But in this day and age, it's possible that author is useless without being liberalized. Since it's relatively new (introduced in 2.0) and regularly misused, perhaps it makes sense to amend the spec to reflect current practice. I'm interesting in know what Brent and Jon think.

 

This is not spec text. It would basically say that author is a string of characters, that may contain markup (with left angle-brackets and ampersands encoded), that indicates who the author for the item is. There may be as many authors as are appropriate, however some aggregators may only accept one, and many don't respect author at all. Something like that.