RSS Advisory Board

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.

RSS Profile Updated with TTL Tests

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:02:20 -0400

The newest draft of the RSS Profile includes tests conducted by James Holderness to determine how well the TTL element is supported in RSS.

RSS Item Element Usage Stats

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 13:08:22 -0400

In RSS Profile research, I analyzed how frequently RSS core elements and namespace elements appear in feeds.

Here's the compiled stats for item elements. Part one covered channel element usage.

The full report reveals that the most popular namespace element in RSS items is dc:creator from the Dublin Core namespace, which appeared in 42.7 percent of the feeds.

The second-most common is wfw:commentRss from the Well-Formed Web namespace, appearing in 34.3 percent. (This total includes wfw:commentRSS, a common miscapitalization of the element name.)

All core elements were found in at least 5 percent of the feeds surveyed with the exception of source, which appeared in 3.0 percent.

The following item elements were found in 1,933 RSS 2.0 feeds, which were chosen because they appear in OPML subscription lists published on the web. The quantity and percentage columns refer to how many feeds contained the element at least once. Parent-child relationships are indicated by hyphens ("-") in the element names. Namespace elements are indicated by colons (":").

Element	Quantity	Percentage
item-description	1865	96.48%
item-title	1845	95.45%
item-link	1833	94.83%
item-guid	1661	85.93%
item-pubDate	1616	83.60%
item-category	921	47.65%
item-comments	846	43.77%
item-dc:creator	826	42.73%
item-wfw:commentRss	662	34.25%
item-slash:comments	528	27.32%
item-content:encoded	252	13.04%
item-feedburner:origLink	223	11.54%
item-dc:date	205	10.61%
item-author	176	9.11%
item-dc:subject	138	7.14%
item-enclosure	110	5.69%
item-wfw:comment	103	5.33%
item-source	59	3.05%
item-trackback:ping	53	2.74%
item-body	35	1.81%
item-lj:security	30	1.55%
item-pingback:server	28	1.45%
item-pingback:target	28	1.45%
item-feedburner:awareness	27	1.40%
item-cc:license	22	1.14%
item-media:content	22	1.14%
item-media:credit	19	0.98%
item-media:text	19	0.98%
item-topix:comments	17	0.88%
item:atom-updated	15	0.78%
item-lj:mood	13	0.67%
item-lj:music	13	0.67%
item-mscom:contentType	13	0.67%
item-mscom:headlineImage	13	0.67%
item-mscom:simpleDate	13	0.67%
item-mscom:attribute	12	0.62%
item-mscom:headlineIcon	12	0.62%
item-itms:album	11	0.57%
item-itms:albumLink	11	0.57%
item-itms:albumPrice	11	0.57%
item-itms:artist	11	0.57%
item-itms:artistLink	11	0.57%
item-itms:coverArt	11	0.57%
item-itms:releasedate	11	0.57%
item-itms:rights	11	0.57%
item-pheedo:origLink	9	0.47%
item-itunes:author	8	0.41%
item:ent:cloud	7	0.36%
item-ent:cloud-ent:topic	7	0.36%
item-jf:modificationDate	7	0.36%
item-jf:replyCount	7	0.36%
item-dc:date.Taken	6	0.31%
item-itunes:explicit	6	0.31%
item-itunes:summary	6	0.31%
item-taxo:topics	6	0.31%
item-taxo:topics-rdf:Bag	6	0.31%
item-taxo:topics-rdf:bag-rdf:li	6	0.31%
item-atom:summary	5	0.26%
item-contentType	5	0.26%
item-creator	5	0.26%
item-geo:lat	5	0.26%
item-geo:long	5	0.26%
item-itunes:duration	5	0.26%
item-itunes:keywords	5	0.26%
item-itunes:subtitle	5	0.26%
item-georss:point	4	0.21%
item-includedComments:comment-collection	4	0.21%
item-itms:rank	4	0.21%
item-feedburner:origEnclosureLink	3	0.16%
item-itunes:block	3	0.16%
item-content:format	2	0.10%
item-itms:song	2	0.10%
item-itms:songLink	2	0.10%
item-subject	2	0.10%
item-author:name	1	0.05%
item:cf:itemRss	1	0.05%
item-dc:contributor	1	0.05%
item-dc:publisher	1	0.05%
item-dc:rights	1	0.05%
item-dcterms:isReferencedBy	1	0.05%
item-dcterms:modified	1	0.05%
item-dWBlogs:comments	1	0.05%
item-icbm:latitude	1	0.05%
item-icbm:longitude	1	0.05%
item-itms:featureArt	1	0.05%
item-live:type	1	0.05%
item-live:typeLabel	1	0.05%
item-media:category	1	0.05%
item-media:thumbnail	1	0.05%
item-media:title	1	0.05%
item-msn:type	1	0.05%
item-rb:guid	1	0.05%
item-rb:source	1	0.05%
item-rb:source_author	1	0.05%
item-rb:source_feed_url	1	0.05%
item-rb:source_published_date	1	0.05%
item-rb:source_url	1	0.05%
item-rb:via_link	1	0.05%
item-trackback:about	1	0.05%
item-wiki:diff	1	0.05%
item-wiki:history	1	0.05%
item-wiki:importance	1	0.05%
item-wiki:status	1	0.05%
item-wiki:username	1	0.05%
item-wiki:version	1	0.05%
item-wordzilla:id	1	0.05%

RSS Channel Element Usage Stats

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:40:02 -0400

As part of the research for the RSS Profile, I compiled statistics on how frequently RSS core elements and namespace elements appear in feeds.

The full report reveals that the most popular namespace element is dc:language from the Dublin Core namespace, which appeared in 36 percent of the feeds.

The second-most common namespace element is atom:link from the Atom syndication format, appearing in 15 percent.

Four core elements were found in fewer than 1 percent of the feeds surveyed: textInput (0.31 percent), rating (0.26), skipDays (0.10) and the skipDays element day (also 0.10).

The following channel elements were found in 1,933 RSS 2.0 feeds, which were chosen because they appear in OPML subscription lists published on the web. The quantity and percentage columns refer to how many feeds contained the element at least once. Parent-child relationships are indicated by hyphens ("-") in the element names. Namespace elements are indicated by colons (":").

Another report is available for item elements.

Element	Quantity	Percentage
channel	1933	100.00%
title	1933	100.00%
link	1932	99.95%
description	1928	99.74%
item	1893	97.93%
generator	1228	63.53%
language	987	51.06%
lastBuildDate	733	37.92%
copyright	715	36.99%
dc:language	700	36.21%
image	521	26.95%
image-url	520	26.90%
image-link	519	26.85%
image-title	518	26.80%
ttl	412	21.31%
docs	411	21.26%
pubDate	391	20.23%
managingEditor	370	19.14%
webMaster	346	17.90%
atom:link	292	15.11%
image-height	217	11.23%
image-width	217	11.23%
category	191	9.88%
dc:creator	166	8.59%
sy:updateFrequency	164	8.48%
sy:updatePeriod	164	8.48%
dc:date	160	8.28%
admin:generatorAgent	158	8.17%
sy:updateBase	150	7.76%
feedburner:browserFriendly	147	7.60%
dc:rights	95	4.91%
skipHours	92	4.76%
skipHours-hour	92	4.76%
cloud	87	4.50%
admin:errorReportsTo	84	4.35%
feedburner:awareness	61	3.16%
cc:license	55	2.85%
image-description	52	2.69%
feedburner:emailServiceId	39	2.02%
feedburner:feedburnerHostname	39	2.02%
geo:lat	39	2.02%
geo:long	39	2.02%
topix:rsslink	17	0.88%
incremental	16	0.83%
atom:id	15	0.78%
openSearch:itemsPerPage	15	0.78%
openSearch:startIndex	14	0.72%
openSearch:totalResults	14	0.72%
feedburner:feedFlare	12	0.62%
itunes:author	12	0.62%
itunes:owner	12	0.62%
itunes:owner-itunes:email	12	0.62%
itunes:category	11	0.57%
itunes:explicit	11	0.57%
itunes:image	10	0.52%
itunes:owner-itunes:name	10	0.52%
itunes:subtitle	9	0.47%
itunes:summary	8	0.41%
dc:publisher	7	0.36%
dc:subject	7	0.36%
itunes:keywords	7	0.36%
textInput	6	0.31%
textInput-description	6	0.31%
textInput-link	6	0.31%
textInput-name	6	0.31%
textInput-title	6	0.31%
thespringbox:skin	6	0.31%
blogChannel:mySubscriptions	5	0.26%
media:rating	5	0.26%
rating	5	0.26%
xhtml:meta	5	0.26%
itunes:block	4	0.21%
media:category	4	0.21%
media:copyright	4	0.21%
media:credit	4	0.21%
media:keywords	4	0.21%
icbm:latitude	3	0.16%
icbm:longitude	3	0.16%
itunes:new-feed-url	3	0.16%
cf:listinfo	2	0.10%
cf:listinfo-cf:sort	2	0.10%
feedstersearch:lastArticle	2	0.10%
feedstersearch:pageId	2	0.10%
feedstersearch:totalResultCount	2	0.10%
Interglacial:generator_url	2	0.10%
Interglacial:livejournal	2	0.10%
Interglacial:self_url	2	0.10%
ng:mceImage	2	0.10%
skipDays	2	0.10%
skipDays-day	2	0.10%
blogChannel:blogRoll	1	0.05%
cf:listinfo-cf:group	1	0.05%
cf:treatAs	1	0.05%
itunes:link	1	0.05%
live:identity	1	0.05%
live:identity-live:alias	1	0.05%
live:identity-live:id	1	0.05%
media:description	1	0.05%
media:thumbnail	1	0.05%
my:docs	1	0.05%
rar:archive	1	0.05%
wiki:interwiki	1	0.05%

RSS Profile Tested in Apple Safari

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 29 May 2007 13:14:26 -0400

A new draft of the RSS Profile adds the result of tests conducted with RSS support in the Apple Safari browser. The profile relies primarily on tests using Bloglines, BottomFeeder, FeedDemon, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0, My Yahoo, NewsGator Online and Opera 9. If you'd like to test with other clients and browsers, please join us on RSS-Public.

RSS Profile Supports Slashdot's Namespace

Fri, 25 May 2007 14:19:22 -0400

The latest draft of the RSS best-practices profile includes advice on the Slash namespace, extensions to RSS that support features of the content-management system that powers Slashdot. Feedback is encouraged on RSS-Public.