Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

A Short History of RSS and Atom

In the Developer’s Bars of the world—those dark, sordid places filled with grizzled coders and their clans—a special corner is always reserved for the developers of content-syndication standards. There, weeping into their beer, you’ll find the veterans of a long and difficult process. Most likely, they will have the Thousand Yard Stare of those who have seen more than they should. The standards you will read about in this book were not born fresh and innocent, of a streamlined process overseen by the Wise and Good. Rather, the following chapters have been dragged into the world and tempered through brawls, knife fights, and the occasional riot. What has survived, it is hoped, is hardy enough to prosper for the foreseeable future.

To fully understand these wayward children, and to get the most out of them, it is necessary to understand the motivations behind the different standards and how they evolved into what they are 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 ...