RSS is currently used for syndicating unstructured textual data, but Web consists of wider variety of resources such as images (see my Syndicated Image and related use cases posts), sounds, movie clips, animations (Flash and SVG), PDF, packages (ZIP, gz, etc.), and structure data (XML).  How do we syndicate these resources using RSS?

Here is one approach.  Add 'type' and 'encoding' attributes to <item> for specifying item's MIME type and encoding method.  Default MIME type is 'text/html'.  There is no default encoding type and unspecified encoding type means it is unknown.  Alternate versions can be use multiple <item> with matching <guid> with order of appearance indicating the order of preference.