Winer is among those who consider the standard complete; others insist it must become more versatile if it's to be an engine of the next-generation Internet - a smarter, two-way street rather than just a blind delivery vehicle.

Anil Dash, vice president of business development for Six Apart, whose Movable Type is among the Web's leading blogging products, says RSS is broken. He promotes a more robust and flexible alternative called Atom that got a big boost when Blogger.com, Google's blogging service, began supporting it in January.

As with most technologies, the market will settle these scores. But first, the market itself has to develop.

Major content providers want to ensure that any feeds they offer drive traffic back to their Web sites.

"The benefit to us is we're distributing our headlines and the users come back to the site," said Catherine Levene, vice president for business development at New York Times Digital, which has been quietly offering feeds for two years.

Many RSS-watchers predict Web feeds will eventually morph into ad-delivery vehicles because it can be expensive to run a Web site that serves up hundreds of thousands of feeds daily, draining bandwidth.

Nevertheless, boosters like Jeremy Zawodny, a software engineer at Yahoo who promoted RSS feeds there, are convinced that 2004 will be the year the technology goes mainstream.

"Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers?" Zawodny wrote in his blog in December. "It's going to be like that. One day we're just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we'll all wonder how we ever got along without it."