The Evolution of RSS

What is RSS? It is a feed or a web feed that is used to publish frequently updated pages like blogs, news, audio web pages etc. The data format used here is XML. It has been evolving since March 2009. It is in the recent days that it is widely used.

RSS came in three versions. RSS 0.91 was called Rich Site Summary. RSS 0.9 and 1.0 was called RDF Site Summary. RSS 2.0 was called Really Simple Syndication.



As far the evolution goes, there were several attempts before RSS that was not widespread. Meta Content Framework was developed by Ramanathan. V. Guha et al in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology group, by restructuring information.


The RSS 0.9 version was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 to be used in My.Netscape.Com portal. The version RSS 0.91 was created by Dan Libby simplifying the format by removing the RDF elements. IT incorporated News Syndication format by Dave Winer. Dan Libby renamed RSS to “Rich Site Summary”.


For eight years, Netscape did not participate in the evolution of RSS as it dropped RSS support to My.Netscape.Com in April 2001. AOL was the new owners of the company and they were restructuring it. There were a couple of entities called the RSS-DEV working group and Winer whose UserLand Software published tools outside Netscape that could read and write RSS. UserLand filed for a trademark registration inside U.S. It failed to satisfy USPTO request of the examiner and hence the proposal was rejected.


Guha and the representatives of O’Reilly Media started working on a project called the RSS-DEV working group. It produced RSS 1.0 in December 2000. It took the name RDF site summary and supported RDF and XML name spaces from metadata such as Dublin Corel


Winer released RSS0.9 which involved audio to be introduced in the feeds. It sparked on Pod casting. Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) was released by Winer in September 2002, which was a totally new format. It removed the “type’ attribute and added namespace support/



Meanwhile due to the controversies of creation a new product called Alternative Syndication format (Atom) was formed. It is the proposed RFC 1287 format. RSS 2.0’s copyright specification was given to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Winer, with Brent Simmons and Jon Udel started an RSS advisory board to answer questions bout the format.

In December 2005, The Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook team adopted the feed icon followed by Opera software. Thus, the commonly used symbol of an Orange box with white Radio waves came in to existence as the industry standard.