RSS History

RSS is what brings new news to your attention.

RSS aggregators work in any language and reach every country around the globe. If you click on the recognizable icon found all over internet sites and see an screen your browser can't digest, copy and paste the URL into your RSS feed reader. If you want to be an RSS subscriber, download an RSS feed reader by doing a Google search for RSS Feed Reader. If you're a web site owner and would like to give your users the freshest information possible downloads the RSS Creation Tutorial.

RSS History

There are a lot of folk legends about the evolution of RSS. Here's the scoop, the sequence of events in the life of RSS, as told by the designer of most of the formats.

Date & Events

Dec 17, 1997 scripting News format, designed by DW at UserLand.

Mar 15, 1999 RSS 0.90, designed by Netscape, for use with my.netscape.com, which also supported scriptingNews format. The only thing about it that was RDF was the header, otherwise it was plain garden-variety XML.

Jul 10, 1999 RSS 0.91, designed by Netscape, spec written by Dan Libby, includes most features from scriptingNews 2.0b1. "We're trying to move towards a more standard format, and to this end we have included several tags from the popular format." The RDF header is gone.

Jul 28, 1999 UserLand adopts RSS 0.91, deprecates scriptingNews formats.

Jul 28, 1999 The RSS team at Netscape evaporates.

Jun 04, 2000 UserLand's RSS 0.91 specification.

Aug 14, 2000 RSS 1.0 published as a proposal, worked on in private by a group led by Rael Dornfest at O'Reilly. Based on RDF and uses namespaces. Most elements of previous formats moved into modules. Like 0.90 it has an RDF header, but otherwise is a brand-new format, not related to any previous format.

Dec 25, 2000 RSS 0.92, which is 0.91 with optional elements, designed by Dave Winer at UserLand.

Apr 20, 2001 RSS 0.93 discussed but never deployed.

Mar 14, 2002 MetaWeblog API merges RSS 0.92 with XML-RPC to provide a powerful blogging API.

Sep 18, 2002 RSS 2.0, which is 0.92 with optional elements, designed by Dave Winer, after leaving UserLand. MetaWeblog API updated for RSS 2.0. While in development, this format was called 0.94.

Jul 15, 2003 RSS 2.0 spec released through Harvard under a Creative Commons license.