Syndication

Defending the W3C's Publication of the RSS Specification

The W3C publishes a copy of the RSS 2.0 specification on its website as part of the documentation for its Feed Validation Service. Dave Winer has started making complaints that the W3C is violating his copyright. As the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, the group whose document the W3C is republishing, I can state that there is no copyright violation by the W3C. It is redistributing our copy of the RSS 2.0 Specification under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike ... (read more)

2023/06/19

What Do You Use to Read RSS Feeds?

In 2007, the RSS Advisory Board published the RSS Best Practices Profile, our advice for how to produce RSS feeds that work best in the wide variety of feed readers, web browsers and other software that consumes feeds. The RSS specification is poorly written in several areas, leading to disagreement over the correct way to do things. We wanted to help programmers and web publishers avoid these hassles. The programs tested as we drafted the profile were Bloglines, BottomFeeder 4.4, Feed Demon ... (read more)

2014/02/25

Remembering the RSS Wars

I was clearing out old saved web pages when I found an amusing weblog post from the syndication wars. Here's Robert Sayre back in 2006: I just left a response on Mihai Parparita's blog, hitting back at Mark Pilgrim, after he decided say that I am full of ---- about everything. Well, that's not very nice, but I've certainly said and written some not-very-nice things myself. It's refreshing to hear it out in the open, instead of backchannel conversations. I'm so tired of all this crap, and I'm as ... (read more)

2009/07/17

Support the Common Feed Icon

A recent Yahoo study reported that four percent of Internet users have jumped on the RSS bandwagon and begun subscribing to syndicated feeds. Considering the number of ways that web publishers show their readers they offer feeds, it's amazing we've gotten that many: In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, the next versions of the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers will identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon used in Mozilla Firefox. Since the market ... (read more)

2006/03/03

Opera Subscribes to Common Syndication Icon

Subscribe Opera has embraced the common syndication icon adopted by Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, lead developer Trond Hansen announced Thursday: Yes, we're adopting it too, and it will be in the next weekly build. Thanks to www.feedicons.com for making it so easy! Oh, and in case you haven't seen it before (what are the odds). I've attached a large version to this post which you can make love to. The icon, which makes it easier to find syndicated content in software and web ... (read more)

2006/02/17

Mozilla, Microsoft Promote New Syndication Icon

The developers of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 have agreed on a common icon to represent syndication feeds, an orange radial symbol created by Stephan Horlander for Firefox. Both browsers display the icon in the status bar when a web page has been associated with a feed using autodiscovery, a simple HTML link tag that provides the feed's address: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.cadenhead.org/workbench"> The icon's ... (read more)

2006/01/24