RSS 0.90, 0.91 Moving to RSS Advisory Board
Netscape announced this afternoon that the first two versions of RSS, RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91, are moving to the RSS Advisory Board. The RSS specification documents, DTDs, and help files for the first versions of RSS (v0.9, v0.91) are being moved to RSSBoard.org, where they will be hosted by the RSS Advisory Board in perpetuity. Netscape will continue to host these files (via redirect) on the My Netscape domain (my.netscape.com) until August 1st, 2008. Netscape launched RSS on March 15, 1999, with the My Netscape ... read more
Sterling Camden, Simone Carletti Join RSS Advisory Board
Two new members have joined the RSS Advisory Board: Sterling "Chip" Camden and Simone Carletti. Camden's a software developer who covers technology and programming topics for TechRepublic. He also writes about RSS frequently on his weblogs Chip's Quips and Chip's Tips. A commercial programmer since 1978, Camden has created the OPML Blogroll and OPML Browser widgets for the WordPress weblog publishing platform. He's also a supporter of the yearly Providing Autism Research golf tournament in Pleasanton, Calif. ... read more
Adding Atom:Link to Your RSS Feed
The RSS Profile includes a recommendation to add an atom:link element to an RSS feed to identify its URL, as in this example from my own blog: <atom:link href="http://feeds.cadenhead.org/workbench" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> To make this work, all I had to do was declare the atom namespace in the feed's rss element: <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> The addition of atom:link, by letting an RSS feed reveal its own address, makes the feed easier to cache, send ... read more
RSS Best Practices Profile Published
The proposal to endorse and publish the RSS Profile has passed 8-1 with RSS Advisory Board members Christopher Finke, James Holderness, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin, Paul Querna, Jake Savin, Jason Shellen and myself voting in favor and Matthew Bookspan voting against. The RSS Profile makes it easier for feed publishers and programmers to implement RSS 2.0, offering advice on issues that arise as you develop software that employs the format. For 18 months, the board worked with the RSS community on ... read more
FeedBurner, Uncertainty and Doubt
On Scripting News today, Dave Winer writes that he can't trust FeedBurner: If things were different I might use Feedburner. Especially on weekday mornings it's amazing how much traffic one file, my RSS 2.0 feed, gets. So it occurs to me that I could streamline things simply by offloading that file to Google. Now that they own Feedburner, this is something I might do, if they take a pledge not to break aggregators that depend on the format of my feed not changing. If someday my feed were to change format and ... read more
RSS Best-Practices Profile Up for a Vote
For the last 18 months, the RSS Advisory Board has been drafting a set of best-practice recommendations for RSS. Working with the developers of browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, aggregators such as Bloglines and Google Reader, and blogging tools including Movable Type, we've looked for areas where questions about the RSS format have led to differences in how software has been implemented to produce and consume RSS feeds. The result of our work is the RSS Profile. The lead authors ... read more
Randy Charles Morin and I are going to propose the RSS Profile to a vote of the RSS Advisory Board next Monday. The effort to draft a set of best practice guidelines for RSS 2.0 has been 18 months in the making. If you see any issues that should be addressed before the vote, or there are changes you'd like us to consider, let us know on the RSS-Public mailing list. ... read more
