A step forward for RSS

A group of web developers has produced a proposal for RSS 1.0, the next generation of the lightweight headline syndication format originally devised for My Netscape.

The new developments have been prompted by the success of the original RSS 0.9 and 0.91 formats, spawning sites such as My.UserLand and O'Reilly's Meerkat. As more people started using RSS, its limitations as a headline description format became apparent.

For example, a financial web site may well wish to annotate each headline with a stock symbol. RSS 0.91 had no way of doing this. More particularly, web sites want to indicate the author of an article, which wasn't supported either.

Unfortunately, as Netscape were no longer developing the format, these frustrations went unresolved.

The goal of RSS 1.0 has been to fix some problems, provide an extensible framework for the future, and bring RSS into community ownership.

An open public working group has been set up to further develop the proposal.

Read more coverage of this story:

• RSS moves forward (Edd Dumbill's weblog)
• Next generation of RSS metadata format (XMLhack)