The RSS formats were preceded by several attempts at
web syndication that did not achieve widespread popularity. The basic idea of restructuring information about websites goes back to as early as 1995, when
Ramanathan V. Guha and others in
Apple's
Advanced Technology Group developed the
Meta Content Framework.
RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by
Dan Libby, Ramanathan V. Guha, and
Eckart Walther at
Netscape. It was released in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9. In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91, which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from
Dave Winer's news syndication format. Libby also renamed the format from RDF to RSS or
Rich Site Summary and outlined further development of the format in a "futures document". This would be Netscape's last participation in RSS development for eight years. As RSS was being embraced by web publishers who wanted their feeds to be used on My.Netscape.Com and other early RSS portals, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com in April 2001 during new owner
AOL's restructuring of the company, also removing documentation and tools that supported the format. Two parties emerged to fill the void, with neither Netscape's help nor approval: The
RSS-DEV Working Group and Dave Winer, whose
UserLand Software had published some of the first publishing tools outside Netscape that could read and write RSS. Winer published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website, covering how it was being used in his company's products, and claimed copyright to the document. A few months later, UserLand filed a U.S. trademark registration for RSS, but failed to respond to a
USPTO trademark examiner's request and the request was rejected in December 2001. The RSS-DEV Working Group, a project whose members included
Aaron Swartz, Guha and representatives of
O'Reilly Media and
Moreover, produced RSS 1.0 in December 2000. This new version, which reclaimed the name RDF Site Summary from RSS 0.9, reintroduced support for RDF and added
XML namespaces support, adopting elements from standard metadata vocabularies such as
Dublin Core. In December 2000, Winer released RSS 0.92 a minor set of changes aside from the introduction of the enclosure element, which permitted audio files to be carried in RSS feeds and helped spark
podcasting. He also released drafts of RSS 0.93 and RSS 0.94 that were subsequently withdrawn. In September 2002, Winer released a major new version of the format, RSS 2.0, that redubbed its initials Really Simple Syndication. RSS 2.0 removed the
type attribute added in the RSS 0.94 draft and added support for namespaces. To preserve backward compatibility with RSS 0.92, namespace support applies only to other content included within an RSS 2.0 feed, not the RSS 2.0 elements themselves. (Although other standards such as
Atom attempt to correct this limitation, RSS feeds are not aggregated with other content often enough to shift the popularity from RSS to other formats having full namespace support.) Because neither Winer nor the RSS-DEV Working Group had Netscape's involvement, they could not make an official claim on the RSS name or format. This has fueled ongoing controversy in the syndication development community as to which entity was the proper publisher of RSS. One product of that contentious debate was the creation of an alternative syndication format, Atom, that began in June 2003. The Atom syndication format, whose creation was in part motivated by a desire to get a clean start free of the issues surrounding RSS, has been adopted as
IETF Proposed Standard . In July 2003, Winer and UserLand Software assigned the copyright of the RSS 2.0 specification to Harvard's
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where he had just begun a term as a visiting fellow. At the same time, Winer launched the
RSS Advisory Board with
Brent Simmons and
Jon Udell, a group whose purpose was to maintain and publish the specification and answer questions about the format. In September 2004, Stephen Horlander created the now ubiquitous
RSS icon () for use in the
Mozilla Firefox browser. In December 2005, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team announced on their blogs that they were adopting Firefox's RSS icon. In February 2006,
Opera Software followed suit. This effectively made the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, replacing the large variety of icons and text that had been used previously to identify syndication data. In January 2006,
Rogers Cadenhead relaunched the RSS Advisory Board without Dave Winer's participation, with a stated desire to continue the development of the RSS format and resolve ambiguities. In June 2007, the board revised their version of the specification to confirm that namespaces may extend core elements with namespace attributes, as Microsoft has done in Internet Explorer 7. According to their view, a difference of interpretation left publishers unsure of whether this was permitted or forbidden. == Example ==