Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition

7.1. RSS

In March of 1999, Netscape launched the My Netscape portal, a single place for users to visit for all of their news. The idea was simple: to pull information from any number of news sources and display it on My Netscape. To facilitate this idea, Dan Libby of Netscape Communications developed an XML data format based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) called RDF Site Summary (RSS). This format would later become known as RSS 0.9.

Shortly after the introduction of RSS 0.9, Dave Winer of Userland Software contacted Libby regarding the RSS 0.9 format. Winer had developed an XML format to use with his site, ScriptingNews, and believed that it and RSS 0.9 could be combined with it and simplified to make a better, more usable, format. In July of 1999, Libby released a prototype of the new Rich Site Summary (also abbreviated as RSS), which became RSS 0.91. My Netscape then began using RSS 0.91 and continued to do so until 2001, when support for external RSS feeds was dropped. Netscape soon lost interest in RSS and left it without an owner. What would follow splintered the RSS format into two different versions.

A mailing list of developers and other interested parties formed in order to continue the development of RSS. This group, called RSS-DEV (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev), produced a specification called RSS 1.0, in December 2000. RSS 1.0 was based on the original RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9) and sought to extend it by modularizing the original 0.9 version. ...