I'm using "RSS" to refer to the standard practice people actually do. It's not very important that some organization somewhere defined an official RSS standard which in principle is flexible but which in practice is never used other than in a very specific way. (Without an agreement on how to use it more generally, no one can build an offline blog archive reader, and the fact that RSS could in principle be the base is irrelevant.)
If you want to play semantics, I'm fine with rephrasing my complaint as: "We need to build on the flexible super official RSS standard -- which is little more than an XML file -- and actually agree on a way of delivering blog archives for offline reading. RSS in practice does not currently achieve this very simple goal." This is just different words to describe the same thing.
> You can write that now. It will work on existing RSS feeds, just not quite as optimally for your proposed use case as you might personally like, but it will still work.
Huh? Other website owners who would like me to be able to read their archives can modify their RSS file, but we have no agreement on how to do that in a standard way. Likewise, I could modify my RSS file, but since there isn't a standard my readers won't have software to take advantage of it.
> (History strongly suggests the large-scale content producers would actively fight you if you try,...unfortunately getting around this problem is a great deal more difficult than hypothesizing that some sort of new standard could somehow deal with it....)
The blogs I want to read offline do not have ads and do not care about this. I just want a solution that works for this simple problem, not a way to take content from people who don't want to give it to me without attaching ads.