This is my blog on RSS, as you will soon discover that RSS has a history which is surrounded in uncertainty and folk law, fundamentally I will address a few questions that will clear you understanding (hopefully).  We will be looking at the following:

 

Where did RSS come from?

 

How long has it been around?

 

What does it stand for?

 

Believe it or not the meaning of RSS has changed over the past years, and there are three meanings of RSS and the versions in which they were introduced.

 

Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)

RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.90 and 1.0)

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

 

Today, we come to believe RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

 

Explanation

 

Before we begin it is important to understand what RSS actually does, how it functions and practical applications, below is an extract from wikipedia that explains RSS very well.

 

“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”^[3], or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays”

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

 

In a nutshell the RSS is an XML-based format and while it can be used in different ways for content distribution, its most widespread usage is in distributing news headlines on the Web.

 

The Benefits of RSS

“The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of content from multiple Web sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator“, which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

 

The First RSS Concept

Chronologically Microsoft was the first to come up with the concept of RSS through its CDF idea which stands for (Microsoft’s) Channel Definition Format.  Channel Definition Format (CDF) is an XML standard used in conjunction with Microsoft Active Channel and Smart Offline Favorites technologies. Its use is to define a website’s content and structure. The standard is somewhat similar to the RSS standard introduced by Netscape several years after CDF was introduced in 1997.

The standard and Active Channel was introduced with the launch of Internet Explorer 4.0, while Smart Offline Favorites was introduced with the launch of Internet Explorer 5.0.

Active Channel allows websites to be listed and syndicated with the end-users’ desktop. Smart Offline Favorites, like channels, enable users to view webpages from the cache.

However, unlike RSS, the idea of Active Channels was not widely accepted and its use was and still is very limited. As a direct result, Microsoft has removed CDF support from Internet Explorer 7.

 The First RSS

 

The first true version of RSS was created by Dan Libby of Netscape. Created in March 1999. Orginally design to be used with the Netscape portal.  At this stage RSS was not really popular and failed to catch on particularly failing with wide spread usage.

 

The RSS-DEV group created RSS 1.0 in December 2000, using the first XML mark up language. Soon after the latter developments followed by the following individuals and contributors:

 

April 2001, Dave Winer came out with RSS 0.93

 

September 2002, Dave Winer released a successor to version 0.92, which he called version 2.0, as the version 1.0 name was already taken.

 

July 2003, Dave Winer passed ownership of RSS 2.0 to Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society

 

January 2005, Sean B. Palmer and Christopher Schmidt released a draft of RSS 1.1, which simplifies the language

 

November 2005, Microsoft proposed some extensions to RSS

 

Posted: June 27th, 2008 under My Blog.
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