Rogers Cadenhead points out that "Sam Ruby has made a tentative change to the Feed Validator, rejecting an RSS 2.0 feed with multiple enclosures per item as invalid."

Technically this means that Blogware is spitting out feeds that may not validate using the Feed Validator. Problem with this is that the spec doesn't prohibit multiple enclosures and that's exactly what we've implemented. The behavior makes sense from a user perspective and I'd like to see the spec updated to allow for this.

Enclosures are just like email attachments and users *expect* to be able to add as many as they want to an entry. I'd really like Tucows to be able to continue to support users with these expectations.

To get an understanding of the other side of the picture, Dave Winer has his view of things over at Scripting News. I'm not sure that I understand his argument. <pubDate> is an attribute of <item> not of  <enclosure>. I understand why this is important to podcasters, but there are other uses for RSS - a state that favors a more liberal interpretation of the spec.

Either way, its time to update the spec. This lack of clarity will only continue to create confusion for the implementors and lead to a bad user experience.

I'm about to release two new prototypes that I expect to be in the hands of roughly 300k users over the next 30 days. All of them will working with RSS2.0 feeds that in various ways expects multiple enclosures. I would love to get some certainty around this point.