Content Syndication with RSS

A Short History

In the main, this book deals with the most common XML content-syndication standard: RSS. As with other Internet standards, it helps to know some of its history before diving into the technicalities.

While it is only three years old, RSS is a somewhat troubled set of standards. Its upbringing has seen standards switch, regroup, and finally split apart entirely under the pressures of parental guidance. To fully understand this wayward child, and to get the most out of it, it is necessary to understand the motivations behind it and how it evolved into what it is today.

HotSauce: MCF and RDF

The deepest, darkest origins of the current versions of RSS began in 1995 with the work of Ramanathan V. Guha. Known to most simply by his surname, Guha developed a system called the Meta Content Framework (MCF). Rooted in the work of knowledge-representation systems such as CycL, KRL, and KIF, MCF’s aim was to describe objects, their attributes, and the relationships between them.

MCF was an experimental research project funded by Apple, so it was pleasing for management that a great application came out of it: ProjectX, later renamed HotSauce. By late 1996, a few-hundred sites were creating MCF files that described themselves, and HotSauce allowed users to browse around these MCF representations in 3D.

It was popular, but experimental, and when Steve Jobs’ return to Apple’s management in 1997 heralded the end of much of Apple’s research activity, Guha left for Netscape.

There, he ...