I’ve been working on the nnrss.el backend for Gnus, doing things like making it find content:encoded, pubDate, rendering the body as HTML, making the links to the article hyperlinks, and integrating my rss-helper.el stuff. With the exception of the URL fetching (which still needs to be smoothed out), it should be quite nice.
In the meantime, I’ve come across several problems with xml.el and offered patches.