RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way to distribute Web content (for example, newsfeeds, sports events, weather, other subjects of personal interest) from one Web site to multiple others. A user must subscribe to a syndicated feed. RSS files can be automatically updated. Content should be written in XML.

The simplicity of RSS (that is, the size of the data transfer and speed of transfer) makes it a very useful application to have for mobile devices (podcasts). You can easily imagine getting live feeds from the stock exchange when values of a selected portfolio of stocks change. You may, as well, look into space shuttle activities or our future trips to Mars and beyond. It is easier to have these feeds keep you abreast of what interests you in the happenings of the world, rather than your having to visit a few dozen sites several times a day.

Modern operating systems have RSS built in. For example, Windows Vista has an RSS reader as part of its SideBar utility, and there’s an RSS database engine built into the operating system. Mac OS X 10.4 and later also has RSS built in as a screen saver and widget. RSS is a great way for your customers, employees, clients, and yourself to get up-to-date information as it’s released. Keep this in mind when marketing your RSS feed.

Origin of RSS

The background of the origin and development of RSS is a reminder that, even with the best of intentions, smart people with sound ambition and good technology can still go astray in the confusing morass of copyrights and property rights. The origin of RSS goes way back in the almost mystical 1990s when Internet startups were almost as common as acne on a teen, and dot-com millionaires were popping up like toads in spring. It was Apple, of course, that led the way. One man in particular at Apple, R. V. Guha, continued his development of the syndication technology with another flagship of innovation and savvy, Netscape. As part of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, Guha created a Meta Content Framework (MCF), which, as its name implies, specified formatting for metadata for Web sites. This is the foundation on which his subsequent development of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) took place at Netscape. RDF has a structure that translates easily into an object-oriented format attribute and values such that the statement ‘‘These autumn hills are of variegated colors’’ could be decomposed into autumnalHills.color(variegated). These specifications became part of the RDF framework under the aegis of W3C, and further information on it can be found at the W3C site (http://www.w3.org/RDF). Indeed, RDF is so widely adaptable that it has been the modeling milieu for quite a number of syntax formats. In the late 1990s, versions of RSS (called RSS .9 and RSS .91) came out based on the RDF specs.

RSS .9 was a syndication feed initially developed for only Netscape feeds through its portal My.Netscape.com. Subsequent developments removed RDF elements and replaced them with another syndication format produced by Dave Winer. This version was known as RSS 0.94. In the meantime, mergers and acquisitions killed off this promising new technology for Netscape for a number of years, during which time it continued to be developed by Winer at another company, UserLand. Depending upon which working group you follow, RSS could mean ‘‘Rich Site Summary,’’ or ‘‘RDF Site Summary,’’ as well as other interpretations. Despite identical acronyms, they were pretty dissimilar: one had a DTD component, and another didn’t; one provided syndication in the way we would understand it today, and another simply summarized site contents. And, as to be expected with competing groups working not necessarily in harmony with each other, you had incompatible versions being produced.

Most versions are backward compatible, but, because RSS was almost two separate formats incidentally named, even that is not as useful as it might otherwise be. For those interested in the specifics, refer to the Web site at http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/ incompatible-rss. UserLand Software failed to obtain trademark rights to RSS. But that did not stop development of RSS by UserLand and other groups. RSS 1.0 (through the combined efforts of Guha within the RSS-Dev working group) came out in 2000, adding support for XML namespaces, and brought back support for RDF. RSS 2.0 came out in 2002, but it was legally unclear as to who owned the rights (as well as what was open source, what was proprietary, and what was Netscape’s role) to it. So, another syndication version, Atom, came out in 2003. It was then adopted as the official syndication standard by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).