Why oh why does the Atom specification require a title element? As a feed markup I like Atom better than RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0 etc etc but I struggle to forgive the insistence on a title element, it’s just a clumsy and inflexible oversight for an otherwise elegant specification.

Twitter brought the unit of discourse down to 140 characters with some interesting results, Atom missed the boat as a markup optimally suited to this age.

And before you say “just use the title element for short content” let me just say ahhhhhh, thats a sucky solution, go away. We could have had better.

Update 2024-03-03: Chris Coyier on titles in feeds