Dave Winer has a new RSS Validator. It appears to be using the Feed Validator source code (coming soon to SourceForge, but available today at feedvalidator.org) as the backend.
The odd thing is, it parses Atom 0.3 feeds and reports them as RSS. This was reported to Dave yesterday. The service appears to be in place to promote RSS as a syndication format, and I have no problem with that. For many uses RSS is great, and exactly what should be used. In other cases Atom is a good choice.
Obviously though, an Atom feed is not valid RSS, but the RSS Validator does not tell you this. Dave could have just disconnected the Atom stuff, and made it a pure RSS validator, but I think the high road would have been to issue a message like so:
You have attempted to validate an Atom feed. This system is for the validation of RSS feeds. If you wish to validate an Atom feed, please use the Feed Validator.
Now, if Dave really thinks RSS is superior to Atom, or has advantages Atom does not (and I’m sure it does) he would have no problem doing this.
On the other hand, if the desire is to promote RSS, and pretend Atom does not exist, well, I don’t have a good suggestion for that one…