Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Trouble over an RSS standard

The story of the development of RSS has all the makings of a daytime drama. Along the way, RSS developers divided into two camps, both claiming right to the initials “RSS” for their specifications. The result is that we, indeed, now have two recent standards, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, that sound sequential, but are actually conflicting. In addition, there are several older incompatible flavors of RSS (0.91, 0.92, 0.93, and others) that are still in use.

Tip

The history of the RSS “fork” is well documented, and it makes for some interesting reading. Check out Mark Pilgrim’s blow-by-blow account taken from actual message board and mailing list posts at diveintomark.org/archives/2002/09/06/history_of_the_rss_fork. You can also find a more general RSS history by Joseph Reagle at http://goatee.net/2003/rss-history.html.

RSS 1.0 is the product of the RSS-DEV Working Group, a committee of individuals, some of whom had worked on various incarnations of RSS since its inception. Their vision for RSS (RDF Site Summary) is that it should take full advantage of RDF (a metadata syntax discussed below) and XML namespaces in order to harness the full power of XML. They added these features into the developing RSS 0.91 spec in development and called the result RSS 1.0.

On the other side of the debate is David Winer (of Userland Software) who maintains that the reason RSS became so popular in the first place is because it was so simple to author and use. It achieved this simplicity ...