RSS History

RSS has been released in many different versions.

History of RSS

• 1997 - Dave Winer develops scriptingNews. Thus RSS was born.

• 1999 - Netscape develops RSS 0.90 (powered by scriptingNews). This is simple XML with an RDF header.

• 1999 - Dave Winer developed scriptingNews 2.0b1 (containing Netscape's RSS 0.90 specifics) at UserLand.

• 1999 - Netscape develops RSS 0.91. In this version, they removed that RDF header, but included most of the features from scriptingNews 2.0b1.

• 1999 - UserLand got rid of scriptingNews and just used RSS 0.91.

• Netscape stopped RSS development

• 2000 - UserLand released the official 0.91 specification

• 2000 - A team led by Rael Dornfest developed RSS 1.0 at O'Reilly. This format uses RDF and namespaces. This version is often confused as the new version of 0.91, but it is a new format that is completely independent of RSS 0.91.

• 2000 - Dave Winer developed RSS 0.92 at UserLand.

• 2002 - Dave Winer developed RSS 2.0 after leaving Userland.

• 2003 - The official RSS 2.0 specification is released.

What’s the difference?

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. While this is less relevant to the average user, data exchange will be easier for individuals and applications by using web standards.

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 formal standard for RSS.

• About 50% of all RSS feeds use RSS 0.91.

• About 25% use RSS 1.0.

• The last 25% uses RSS 0.9x version or RSS 2.0.