The RSS-DEV Working Group was the outgrowth of a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

in RSS format development. The private, non-commercial

working group A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...

began with a dozen members in three countries, and was chaired by Rael Dornfest, researcher and developer of the Meerkat RSS-reader software.

History

RSS-0.90 was released by

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

circa March 1999, at which point the acronym implied ''RDF Site Summary''. The functionality was remarkably different from what is now known as RSS, or ''Really Simple Syndication''. The former simply provided a website summary, while the latter was designed for syndication. July 1999 saw the release of RSS-0.91, an improvement on its predecessor; the latter was

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

-based, as opposed to the use of RDF ''(or Resource Description Framework)'' by the earlier version, which was then deprecated by Netscape. The new version also provided support for DTD, allowing for additional

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

-like functionality.

Development fork

The following year,

UserLand Software UserLand Software is a US-based software company, founded in 1988, that sells web content management, as well as blogging software packages and services. Company history Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spri ...

released its own RSS-0.91, circa June 2000. Unlike the Netscape version, this variant had no support for DTD. A team of developers, which would become members of the core development team of the RSS-DEV Working Group, broke away from the project. This group released its own set of specifications called RSS-1.0, on December 6, 2000. RSS-1.0 marked a return to the use of the Netscape-deprecated RSS-0.90; the group also created its own interpretation of the RSS acronym — ''RDF Site Summary''. This version, which was developed in parallel to the UserLand version, was incompatible with all other versions.

Members

*Gabe Beged-Dov, JFinity Systems LLC *Dan Brickley, ILRT * Rael Dornfest, O'Reilly & Associates * Ian Davis, Calaba, Ltd. *Leigh Dodds, xmlhack *Jonathan Eisenzopf, Whirlwind Interactive *David Galbraith, Moreover.com * R.V. Guha, guha.com *Ken MacLeod, (Independent) *Eric Miller, Online Computer Library Center, Inc. *

Aaron Swartz Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS, the tech ...

, The Info Network *Eric van der Vlist, Dyomedea

External links

Main PageA Brief History of RSSRss Index
Working groups RSS