This surprises me.  Guess it shouldn't but it does. RSS is sadly out of fashion in the tech industry. 

Depends on the reader, a lot of them unfortunately try to turn themselves into web services. There are a few good new ones and all the old desktop standbys are still out there. 

I don't use RSS readers so perhaps everyone already knew this, but I didn't realize they let you download the contents of your feeds. That is very cool. 