Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Module Status

There is a great deal of confusion surrounding the status of individual modules within RSS 1.0. What, people often ask, makes a module “official” or not. The RSS 1.0 specification itself states that:

Modules are classified as Proposed until accepted as Standard by members of the rss-dev working group or a sub-membership thereof focused on the area addressed by the module

However, this is overblowing the situation somewhat. The rss-dev working group, of which I am a member, has never actually considered the issue beyond this. Modules have, since the beginning of the specification, been allowed to flourish or die on their own merits and have never really undergone any form of accreditation process since the beginning.

So, currently there are only three modules classified as Standard—Dublin Core, Syndication, and Content—and more than 20 others that are Proposed. Considering that this indicates only the lack of a schedule for actually voting on the modules and that we have no real idea of what the voting really means anyway, you can safely consider all modules equally useful, at least in terms of some arbitrary rules body saying they’re okay. In reality, working code trumps Working Groups: go ahead and use anything you like. RSS 2.0 never had this restriction, and the same philosophy applies.