A Brief History of RSS
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
Where did RSS come from? How long has it been around? RSS has had quite a history, some of which is shrouded in folklore, so I can’t guarantee that my understanding of RSS history is 100 percent flawless. In fact, even what RSS stands for has changed over the years! There are three meanings for RSS and the version in which they were introduced:
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.90 and 1.0)
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Today, the most common meaning is Really Simple Syndication.
So where did the idea of syndicationsubscribing to a site’s contentcome from? Long before RSS, there were various other formats (you couldn’t quite call them languages) that supported syndications. You might recall Microsoft’s Channel Definition Format (CDF), which worked with the Active Channel feature of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Using CDF, you could subscribe to various online publication sites. Internet Explorer would check those publishers regularly and download new data as it became available. CDF was introduced in 1997, and in the same year, a developer at Userland.com, Dave Winer, introduced his own XML-based format for syndication in his Scripting News Web log. Userland.com, which first appeared in 1997, specializes in Web publishing software, and figures heavily in the history of RSS.
