Half of standards making is minutia, and the other half is politics. Rightly or wrongly, I've always suspected that Atom was born, not so much of necessity, as from ideological conflicts between the XML crowd and the founders of RSS. Likewise, I reckoned that HTML5 was at least partially Hixie's revenge against XHTML. The first 500 times I read the emerging HTML 5 specification, I looked at it through the goggles of this and other prejudices.