The Players


The history of syndication feeds goes back to the days when Microsoft and Netscape were competing for domination in the "browser wars," and is just as contentious. However, for the majority of people interested in syndication feeds, most of this early history doesn't matter. What does, is an overview of the primary syndication feeds that are in use today.

One of the most common feed formats is called RSS 2.0, with the RSS in this case meaning "Really Simple Syndication." RSS 2.0 is an XML format, considered highly stable, that allows for extensions only through the use of namespacesa way of prepending ownership on specific field names, so the same names can be used for different purposes without collision.

The RSS 2.0 specification is currently being maintained at Harvard; its website is blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss. Though the specification is frozen, there is a Creative Commons license on it that allows any developer to code for the format, and to publish tools to provide feeds meeting the format's specification. An advisory board of three people makes any decisions about the status of the specification.

Though not covered elsewhere in this document, an earlier version of RSS 2.0 called RSS 0.92 (or even 0.91) is in fairly wide use at several different websites. However, since it is primarily an older version of RSS 2.0, I'm only mentioning it in case you come across it.

A second major syndication feed is also called RSS, and it's RSS 1.0. In this case, RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary" because RSS is formatted as RDF/ XMLa vocabulary based on a formalized model that is then serialized (written out) in XML.

RSS 1.0 is maintained by a loose organization of interested developers and other folks who mainly do their work in a Yahoo Groups mailing list at groups. yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/. The specification has been stable for several years, and can be seen at web.resource.org/rss/1.0/. In 2005 another group went through the specification and provided a recommended 1.1 release of RSS 1.0 to cover several corrected items. RSS 1.1 can be seen at inamidst.com/rss1.1/. For the most part, though, many implementations of the RDF version of RSS are still at RSS 1.0.

The final common format for syndication feeds is called Atom (http://atomenabled.org/). It was created using a wiki, with all interested people invited to participate and contribute. Atom 1.0 was released in August 2005, and is under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international standards organization. Note, though, that Atom existed as a 0.3 release for a considerable length of time and organizations may be still running this now obsolete version.

There are other variations and versions of syndication feeds, but the threeRSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atomare the ones most commonly used, and as such, the only ones we'll discuss from this point on. Before we get into working with feeds "in the wild," we'll take a look at what generally goes into each of these feeds.




What Are Syndication Feeds
What Are Syndication Feeds
ISBN: 321490452
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 19

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