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I'm not arguing that embedded markup isn't wrong. I'm looking for an alternative. You write "The aggregators might argue that they're just using XML as a transport protocol and have no control over the actual content." This is a completely valid argument isn't it? If we consider RSS as purely a transport mechanism and that we actually want the markup to come out the other end intact, then what you're really arguing is that we shouldn't use XML as a transport mechanism. Exactly the same problem occurs with more formal XML-based transport mechanisms such as xmlrpc or SOAP.
And let's not forget that RSS is the single most successful XML format ever and escaping html in the description tag has been with us since the beginning. It may be wrong, it may be ugly and it may well be harmful, but dammit, it works.
Now look at it from the POV of the humble website developer building a community news site. You have limited control over what the users type in. You have to jump through hoops to do your best to produce well formed XML. Once in a while it goes wrong. Now who's to blame? The developer? The RSS specs? XML?
And last time I looked CDATA was actually part of the XML spec. So the feed still validates as XML. So what is your problem exactly?
And btw, FOAF is not an XML vocabulary, it's an RDF vocabulary. ;-)
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