Keith McGregor

The Evolution of RSS

Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight XML vocabulary for describing metadata about Web sites, ideal for news syndication. Originated by User Land Software in 1997 and used by Netscape to populate Netscape's My Netscape portal with external news feeds ("channels") RSS has taken on a life of its own and has become perhaps the most popular XML format today. Thousands of web designers today use RSS as a "what's new" mechanism to drive traffic their way.

Evolution of RSS versions are as follows:

• RSS 0.9 RSS 0.9 is a simple XML format with 10 elements used to describe information about websites, typically news stories or articles, etc. These elements include the notion of a "channel," that contains up to 15 "item’s, each of which consists of a "title" and a "link." Web designers could use RSS 0.9 files to syndicate their content, using links (no descriptions) to their stories. The format is still quite popular.

• RSS 0.91 0.91 added 14 elements to better describe channels, items, and update frequency; including a new "description" element for items (what some call "leads" or "blurbs").

• RSS 0.92 0.92 adds new optional features that website developers wanted like blog synthesis (item sub-elements optional, item descriptions can contain entity-encoded HTML markup [links, etc.]), source attribution (source of item), enclosures, taxonomy information (category of item), and the cloud sub-element of channel, which notifies aggregators when the channel is updated for more timely updates, and to save bandwidth. RSS 0.92 is upwardly compatible with RSS 0.91 as new features of 0.92 are optional, meaning that a 0.91 file is also a valid 0.92 file.

• RSS 1.0 RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0 was released on December 6, 2000 by the RSS-Dev working group. RSS 1.0 is a modularized version of the original RSS 0.90 format designed to balance extensibility with simplicity. Modules can extend the core RSS 1.0 spec for use in various applications without requiring new RSS versions. Extending RSS 1.0 using namespaces should avoid much of the chaos we witnessed with the ad hoc evolution of HTML.

RSS is the most successful XML format to date by virtue of its simplicity. Humans can easily read and understand RSS files, fostering its rapid adoption. But RSS's simplicity belies its power. Widely adopted standards can create synergistic "meta-opportunities" for value-added services that span domains of knowledge. In fact the most recent versions of RSS can become the basis of extensible Slashdot-like applications, far beyond simple news syndication.

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