RSS History
RSS has been published in many different versions.
The History of RSS
The History of RSS
- 1997- Dave Winer developed scriptingNews. RSS was born from this.
- 1999- Netscape developed RSS 0.90 (supported by scriptingNews). This was simple XML with an RDF header.
- 1999- Dave Winer at UserLand developed scriptingNews 2.0b1 (which included features from Netscape's RSS 0.90).
- 1999- Netscape developed RSS 0.91. In this version, they removed the RDF header, but included most of the features from scriptingNews 2.0b1.
- 1999- UserLand got rid of scriptingNews and used only RSS 0.91.
- Netscape stopped development of RSS
- 2000- UserLand released the official 0.91 specification.
- 2000- A team led by Rael Dornfest at O'Reilly developed RSS 1.0. This format used RDF and namespaces. This version is often confused as a new version of 0.91, but it is a completely new format independent of RSS 0.91.
- 2000- Dave Winer at UserLand developed RSS 0.92.
- 2002- Dave Winer developed RSS 2.0 after leaving Userland.
- 2003- The official RSS 2.0 specification was released.
What are the differences?
RSS 1.0 is the only version developed using the W3C's RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard.
The idea behind RDF is to help build a semantic web.Read more about RDF and the Semantic Web here. Although this has little to do with ordinary users, using Web standards makes data exchange easier for individuals and applications.
Which RSS version should I use?
RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 are easier to understand than RSS 1.0. Our tutorial is based on RSS 2.0.
Is there a Web standard for RSS?
There is no official standard for RSS.
- About 50% of all RSS feeds use RSS 0.91.
- About 25% use RSS 1.0.
- The remaining 25% use RSS 0.9x versions or RSS 2.0.