RSS is full of embedded HTML. It's practically impossible to make a good news reader without doing some heavy manipulation on it and trying to extract/modify ugly elements. We have a full blog post on the topic here: http://blog.streamified.com/post/45846467833/the-future-of-s...

There's a discussion below this one why it makes sense to have a single API for this, instead of open-sourcing the code. The benefits are numerous (we're hooking into many paid APIs and covering the costs, for example).