With RSS 2.0, a pubDate and author were introduced. The former used RFC 2822 format vs ISO 8601. The latter required an email address. This lead to the formulation of the concept of "funky" feeds which was used to describe RSS 2.0 feeds which contain elements which were meant to be replaced in RSS 2.0 by these newer definitions.
<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2003 14:00:00 PDT</pubDate>
<author>rubys@intertwingly.net</author>
<body xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<b>bold text</b>
</body>