RSS Advisory Board

6 Edits Made to RSS Specification

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0400

In a 7-0 vote, the RSS Advisory Board has approved six edits to the RSS specification, the documentation for the RSS 2.0 format. These edits do not affect the definitions of the elements and attributes that constitute RSS. They were purely administrative changes that improve the readability of the document, fix a broken link and factual errors, and link to use-case documentation on the board's site.

The revision history for the specification describes the edits.

The proposal was made by Rogers Cadenhead and seconded by Sterling Camden. They were joined by members Simone Carletti, James Holderness, Randy Charles Morin, Ryan Parman and Paul Querna voting in favor.

The RSS Namespace?

Randy Charles Morin — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:46:36 -0500

Should RSS have a namespace? Recently, there's been discussion on th rss-public messages list about adding a namespace to RSS for RSS elements that are embedded in other XML documents. Currently, it is impossible to embed RSS elements inside other XML elements that have a default namespace. This proposal would allow such.

Please post your arguments here.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/message/1874

Please review the initial discussion here.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/message/1831

Ryan Parman Joins RSS Advisory Board

Randy Charles Morin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:20:35 -0500

Congrats to Ryan Parman, the newest member of the RSS Advisory Board.

Ryan is the creator of SimplePie and Tarzan AWS and co-founder of WarpShare. He also co-built the Y! Messenger website. You can find out more about Ryan on his Website.

Ryan's Bio

RSS in 2008

Randy Charles Morin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:06:48 -0400

This week, Steve Rubel has written a couple of blog posts that have made me kick myself in the ass for not doing more as chair of the board.

This is required reading for everybody who wants to help me advance RSS.

First he writes RSS Adoption at 11% and it May Be Peaking.

Then he writes I've Seen the Future of News, It's the Newsfeed.

Randy Charles Morin Becomes RSS Advisory Board Chair

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:42:49 -0400

Randy Charles Morin has become the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, taking over for Rogers Cadenhead, who will continue as a member.

Morin, a member of the board since 2006, is an RSS software developer who created the enormously popular RSS-to-email service SendMeRSS, which had 50,000 users when it was sold to NBC Universal in 2007. Morin began the site -- originally called R-Mail, as a personal project, turning it into a business when it grew by 15,000 users over a 90-day period.

A member of the RSS community who's been evangelizing the format for years, Morin publishes the RSS Blog, a how-to site forRSS publishers and developers that has more than 6,800 subscribers toits feed.

While on the board, Morin led the development of the RSS Best Practices Profile, a set of recommendations that make it easier for feed publishers and programmers to implement RSS 2.0.

Microsoft Updates RSS User Agent

Rogers Cadenhead — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:12:51 -0500

Microsoft has announced that the user agent string for the next version of the RSS Platform will be "Windows-RSS-Platform/2.0 (MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)".

The platform will be used by Internet Explorer 8 to request the user's subscribed RSS feeds.

RSS 0.90, 0.91 Moving to RSS Advisory Board

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:14:15 -0500

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 Network and an RSS 0.90 specification written by Ramanathan Guha. Four months later, RSS 0.91 was launched with a specification written by Dan Libby. Five years after revolutionizing the web browser, Netscape sparked another revolution on the web with XML-based syndication.
All websites that produce RSS 0.9 or RSS 0.91 feeds will need to either convert to using the current standard (RSS v2.0), or if desired, convert their v0.9/v0.91 feeds properly using this guide, provided by the RSS Advisory Board, by August 1st.

The board will ensure the continued availability of the specifications and the RSS 0.91 DTD (document type definition), which still receives four million hits a day from XML parsing software. We could use some advice from Apache admins on how to serve a file that often without reducing the HTTP server to a smoldering heap of rubble.

In the eight years since Netscape published the first RSS specification, the format has become as essential to the web as HTML, XHTML and CSS. By my estimation, the specs and related DTDs have been requested from Netscape's servers more than one billion times.

As the current chairman of the board, I'd like to thank Guha and Libby for their work on the first two versions of RSS and more recent Netscape employees Chris Finke and Tom Drapeau for helping this transition. Though most RSS feeds use the current version today, thousands of feed publishers continue to employ RSS 0.9 and RSS 0.91. Long after Netscape closed the first incarnation of the My Netscape Network and had no business interest in RSS, the company contributed to the success of web syndication by keeping these documents online.

Sterling Camden, Simone Carletti Join RSS Advisory Board

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:39:26 -0500

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.

The first Italian to serve on the board, Carletti is a technical manager at Altura Labs and a contributor to the instructional web publishing site HTML.it. He specializes in RSS-related issues.

Carletti's also the author of the Italian translation of the RSS specification.

Welcome to the board!

WordPress Adds Atom:Link to RSS Feeds

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:39:33 -0400

WordPress support for the atom:link element in RSS feeds has gone live in both the standalone and multiuser versions of the software. The RSS Profile recommends that feeds include atom:link to identify the feed's URL.

<atom:link href="http://photomatt.net/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

You can see the element in WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg's RSS feed, which is published with version "2.4-bleeding," and the Strange Maps feed published with WordPress MU. The official release of WordPress 2.4 is scheduled for December.

RSS Best Practices Profile Published

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:20:06 -0400

The proposal to endorse and publish the RSS Profile has passed 8-1 with RSS Advisory Board members Rogers Cadenhead, Christopher Finke, James Holderness, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin, Paul Querna, Jake Savin and Jason Shellen 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 interoperability issues, receiving help from representatives at Bloglines, FeedBurner, Google, Microsoft, Netscape, Six Apart and Yahoo. The profile tackles the most frequently asked questions posed by developers:

How many enclosures can an item contain?
Are relative URLs OK in item descriptions?
Is it OK to use HTML in elements other than an item's description?

For the answers, read the sections on enclosures, item descriptions and character data, respectively.

Sam Ruby announced this morning that the Feed Validator now tests for conformance to the profile, offering 11 new checks for improving interoperability.

If you'd like to comment on the profile and the new validator checks, post on the mailing list RSS-Public.

As part of the vote, the following sentence has been added to the About this document section of the RSS specification: "The RSS Profile contains a set of recommendations for how to create RSS documents that work best in the wide and diverse audience of client software that supports the format." No other changes were made and all edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.10.

With the publication of the profile, we're eager to work with companies and individual developers on the adoption of its recommendations. Also, we're looking for people who can write foreign language translations of the document, which has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Proposal: Publish the RSS Best-Practices Profile

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:59:51 -0400

The following RSS Advisory Board proposal has been made by Rogers Cadenhead and seconded by Randy Charles Morin.

Under the advisory board charter, the board has seven days to discuss the proposal followed by seven days to vote on it. Interested parties can comment on the proposal on the mailing list RSS-Public.

Proposal

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 are James Holderness, Morin, Geoffrey Sneddon and myself. The profile isn't a set of rules; it's a set of suggestions drafted by programmers and web publishers who've been working with RSS since the format's first release in 1999. Our goal is for the profile to be the second document programmers consult when they're learning how to implement RSS.

The profile tackles some long-standing issues in RSS implementation, including the proper number of enclosures per item, the meaning of the TTL element and the use of HTML markup in character data.

In addition to recommendations for the RSS elements documented in the specification, the profile includes advice for four common namespace elements: atom:link, content:encoded, dc:creator and slash:comments.

We propose that the board endorse and publish the RSS Profile, making it available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license so that others can build upon and extend it with their own recommendations.

Additionally, we propose that the following sentence be added to the About this document section of the specification, as a new fifth paragraph: "The RSS Profile contains a set of recommendations for how to create RSS documents that work best in the wide and diverse audience of client software that supports the format."

BlogLines Adds IPhone Version

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:35:24 -0400

The web-based RSS reader Bloglines now offers a mobile version of its service optimized for Apple iPhone. You can read full-text feeds, search for feeds and specific text across all feeds, and turn on Skweezer, a service that makes web pages more readable on mobile devices.

RSS Profile Includes New TTL Recommendation

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:01:46 -0400

The draft of the RSS Profile has been updated with a new recommendation for how aggregators should implement the TTL element.

RSS Profile Nearing Completion

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:04:20 -0400

The RSS Best Practices Profile has been revised and is close to being submitted to a vote of the RSS Advisory Board. Aggregator developers and RSS publishers who'd like to submit recommendations for inclusion in the document are encouraged to do so on the RSS-Public mailing list by July 1.

RSS 2.0 Specification (Version 2.0.9) Published

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:19:03 -0400

The proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 5-1 with RSS Advisory Board members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Christopher Finke, Randy Charles Morin and Paul Querna voting in favor, Eric Lunt voting against and members James Holderness, Meg Hourihan, Jenny Levine and Jason Shellen abstaining.

The Extending RSS section of the specification has been clarified with the addition of the words "and attributes" twice in the following sentence:

A RSS feed may contain elements and attributes not described on this page, only if those elements and attributes are defined in a namespace.

No other changes were made. All edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.9.