I found out late last week while on vacation that I would be speaking on an RSS panel this week. Now this is a topic that I am very familiar with but given the uncertainty of what may be asked I started digging around for all I can find on RSS. As you might expect I started with Dave Winer, the father of RSS, and went on from there. As you would expect there are differing opinions in where RSS is headed. What is amazing is that how current the conversation seems to stay, which I suppose simply illustrates how big RSS is/will be. Dave himself still comments from time to time.
Looking back through the blog on RSS I found a good quote:
“When people ask me what RSS is, I say it’s automated web surfing. We took something lots of people do, visiting sites looking for new stuff, and automated it. It’s a very predictable thing, that’s what computers do — automate repetitive things.” – Dave Winer 9/11/2005
Below is a list of items that are useful in firming up ones knowledge on RSS. I will add to it over the next few days as I come across more.
- RSS 2.0 Specification – Harvard still owns it
- Dave Winer’s Blog – RSS category
- RSS (file format) – definition on Wikipedia
- RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 – comparison by Tim Bray
- RSS version usage – nice chart on Syndic8.com
Now the history of RSS is interesting. While I agree that the credit should be given to Dave Winer, the work done by a few others certainly must have spurred his ideas.
If you go way back to 1995 you can find work done by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple before he left and went to Netscape. He then worked with Tim Bray to create RDF using XML. The picture to the right is a program called HotSauce written by Guha while at Apple. What is amazing is that it is so close to other current tools you see around today. I can remember playing with this in my early days as a Web Editor working on my Mac 6100. Thanks to a colleague, CNN.com had an RDF feed way back in 1997 or so. It wasn’t publicized mind you but a small crowd was very appreciative.
Dave Winer steps in and takes what Netscape has done and modifies it to work with an XML format he built for his weblog and RDF becomes RSS — Really Simple Syndication. From here it gets messy, with opinions getting in the way and we wind up with several flavors. Today you will see a few versions that have survived — RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom. RSS 2.0 and Atom seem to be most common, with RSS 2.0 getting the nod by most large companies. Most aggregators will handle any of these.
With the specification frozen by Harvard (and Winer) it is likely that RSS 2.0 will stay popular and until another format comes along to challenge it and earn the support of the community RSS will be the safe choice for syndication.
