Content Syndication with RSS

Chapter 8. RSS 2.0 (Simply Extensible)

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Readers who are taking each chapter in order may be puzzled as to why I have gone from RSS 1.0, with its complex RDF capabilities and syntax, back to a much simpler standard. I have done this for two reasons. First, by now you should be fully aware of the concept of XML namespaces and the idea of modules. Second, because RSS 2.0 is the latest RSS standard to be released, and it is the newest thing in this book, it makes sense to go in some sort of chronological order.

Finalized on 19 August 2002, RSS 2.0 was the result of a great deal of argument and distress within the RSS development community. Perhaps inspired by the announcement of this book, the community had spent the summer of 2002 looking for ways to improve the RSS specification and—if possible—recombine the two strands.

The major stumbling blocks were, of course, RDF and modules.

As you will see, the resultant specification managed to incorporate one of these wishes — modules — but again rejected any use of RDF. Further arguments over the name (many people wanted to call it RSS 0.94 — 0.93 was abandoned previously) and the way in which the specification was decided led, sadly, to a similarly antagonistic position as before, though it did make the simpler strand of RSS a great deal more useful.

The Specification in Detail

RSS 2.0 is basically RSS 0.92 with modules allowed and a handful of additional elements. There ...