History of RSS

RSS has been released in many different versions.

The History of RSS
Here is the history of RSS according to Dave Winer (key developer of most of the RSS formats):

• Dec. 1997 - Dave Winer developed scriptingNews
   
• Mar. 1999 - RSS 0.90 was developed by Netscape, which supported the scriptingNews format. This was simply XML with a RDF Header
   
• Jun. 1999 - scriptingNews 2.0b1 was developed by Dave Winer at UserLand. This included Netscape's RSS 0.90 features
   
• Jul. 1999 - RSS 0.91 was an attempt by Netscape to move towards a more standard format and included most features from scriptingNews 2.0b1 but they removed the RDF header
   
• Jul. 1999 - UserLand uses RSS 0.91 and gets rid of scriptingNews
   
• Netscape discontinues their RSS development
   
• Jun. 2000 - Official RSS 0.91 specification release from UserLand
   
• Aug. 2000 - RSS 1.0 developed by a group lead by Rael Dornfest at O'Reilly. This format uses RDF and namespaces. Because of its name it is often confused as being a new version of 0.91, but this is a completely new format with no ties to RSS 0.91
   
• Dec. 2000 - RSS 0.92 developed by Dave Winer at UserLand and includes optional elements
   
• Sep. 2002 - RSS 2.0 is designed by Dave Winer after leaving Userland
   
• Jul. 2003 - RSS 2.0 specification released through Harvard under a Creative Commons license

What Are The differences?
Unlike the other RSS formats, RSS 1.0 was developed using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard.
The idea behind RDF is to help create a Semantic Web. Read more about RDF and Semantic Web here. This does not matter too much for ordinary users, but is used towards the goal for a web standard that will make it easier for persons and applications to exchange data.

What RSS Version Should I Use?
RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 are easiest to understand. RSS 1.0 is more complex to learn and takes more time and bandwidth to process.
Our tutorial is based on RSS 2.0.

Is There an RSS Web Standard?
There is no official standard for RSS. But about 50 % of all RSS feeds use the RSS 0.91 format. About 25 % use the RSS 1.0 format and the last 25 % is split between the other RSS 0.9x versions and RSS 2.0.

RSS Syntax

The syntax rules of RSS 2.0 are very simple and very strict.
This tutorial teaches how to create your own RSS feed and maintain it.

An Example RSS document
RSS documents use a self-describing and simple syntax.

The first line in the document - the XML declaration - defines the XML version and the character encoding used in the document. In this case the document conforms to the 1.0 specification of XML and uses the ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1/West European) character set.
The next line describes the RSS element of the document (like it was saying: "this is an RSS document - version 2.0"):

The next line describes the <channel> element of the document:

The next three lines describe three child elements of the <channel> element (<title>, <link> and <description>):

Then there is an <item> element. The <item> element contains the information you would like your RSS feed to show (<title>, <link> and <description>). You can add multiple <item> elements:

Finally, the two last lines close the <channel> and <rss> elements:

Did you understand that this was an RSS feed from W3Schools? Don't you agree that RSS is pretty self-descriptive?

RSS is an XML Dialect
Because RSS is XML, there are a couple of things you must remember.

• All XML elements must have a closing tag
• XML tags are case sensitive
• All XML elements must be properly nested
• Attribute values must always be quoted

Comments in RSS
The syntax for writing comments in RSS is similar to that of HTML: