(Although other standards such as Atom attempt to correct this limitation, RSS feeds are not aggregated with other content often enough to shift the popularity from RSS to other formats having full namespace support.)īecause neither Winer nor the RSS-DEV Working Group had Netscape's involvement, they could not make an official claim on the RSS name or format. To preserve backward compatibility with RSS 0.92, namespace support applies only to other content included within an RSS 2.0 feed, not the RSS 2.0 elements themselves. RSS 2.0 removed the type attribute added in the RSS 0.94 draft and added support for namespaces. In September 2002, Winer released a major new version of the format, RSS 2.0, that redubbed its initials Really Simple Syndication. He also released drafts of RSS 0.93 and RSS 0.94 that were subsequently withdrawn.

In December 2000, Winer released RSS 0.92 Ī minor set of changes aside from the introduction of the enclosure element, which permitted audio files to be carried in RSS feeds and helped spark podcasting. This new version, which reclaimed the name RDF Site Summary from RSS 0.9, reintroduced support for RDF and added XML namespaces support, adopting elements from standard metadata vocabularies such as Dublin Core. The RSS-DEV Working Group, a project whose members included Aaron Swartz, Guha and representatives of O'Reilly Media and Moreover, produced RSS 1.0 in December 2000. trademark registration for RSS, but failed to respond to a USPTO trademark examiner's request and the request was rejected in December 2001. A few months later, UserLand filed a U.S. Winer published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website, covering how it was being used in his company's products, and claimed copyright to the document.

Two parties emerged to fill the void, with neither Netscape's help nor approval: The RSS-DEV Working Group and Dave Winer, whose UserLand Software had published some of the first publishing tools outside Netscape that could read and write RSS. As RSS was being embraced by web publishers who wanted their feeds to be used on My.Netscape.Com and other early RSS portals, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com in April 2001 during new owner AOL's restructuring of the company, also removing documentation and tools that supported the format. This would be Netscape's last participation in RSS development for eight years. Libby also renamed the format from RDF to RSS Rich Site Summary and outlined further development of the format in a 'futures document'. Which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer's news syndication format. In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91, It was released in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Dan Libby and Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple's Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework. The basic idea of restructuring information about websites goes back to as early as 1995, when Ramanathan V. The RSS formats were preceded by several attempts at web syndication that did not achieve widespread popularity. Main article: History of web syndication technology The RSS reader checks the user's feeds regularly for new information and can automatically download it, if that function is enabled. Users subscribe to feeds either by entering a feed's URI into the reader or by clicking on the browser's feed icon. RSS feed data is presented to users using software called a news aggregator and the passing of content is called web syndication. RSS formats are specified using a generic XML file.Īlthough RSS formats have evolved from as early as March 1999, it was between 20 when RSS gained widespread use, and the (' ') icon was decided upon by several major web browsers. An RSS document (called 'feed', 'web feed', or 'channel') includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author's name. Websites usually use RSS feeds to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, episodes of audio and video series, or for distributing podcasts. News aggregators (or 'RSS readers') can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format.

Updates of a website and its related metadata ( web feed)

Open source rss server