The Rise and Demise of RSS

A comprehensive history of RSS: how and when it was invented, the controversy’s it has endured, and what has superseded it.

https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html

• After the introduction of Atom, there were three competing versions of RSS: Winer’s RSS 0.92 (updated to RSS 2.0 in 2002 and renamed “Really Simple Syndication”), the RSS-DEV Working Group’s RSS 1.0, and Atom.

• Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.

• And yet, two decades later, after the rise of social media and Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader, RSS appears to be a slowly dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters, programmers with tech blogs, and the occasional journalist.

• That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, a web that hardly resembles the syndicated web of Werbach’s imagining.

• RSS was invented twice. This meant it never had an obvious owner, a state of affairs that spawned endless debate and acrimony. But it also suggests that RSS was an important idea whose time had come.

• At the root of this disagreement about namespaces was a deeper disagreement about what RSS was even for. Winer had invented his Scripting News format to syndicate the posts he wrote for his blog. Netscape had released RSS as “RDF Site Summary” because it was a way of recreating a site in miniature within the My Netscape online portal.

• there was eventually contention between a “Let’s Build the Semantic Web” group and “Let’s Make This Simple for People to Author” group even within Netscape.

• Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was.

• RSS, an open format, didn’t give technology companies the control over data and eyeballs that they needed to sell ads, so they did not support it.

• More than a year before Netscape announced My Netscape Network, on December 15, 1997, Winer published a post announcing that the blog would now be available in XML as well as HTML.

• the RSS 0.91 specification had become woefully inadequate. There were all sorts of things people were trying to do with RSS that the specification did not address.

• The fork might have been avoided if a better effort had been made to include Winer in the RSS-DEV Working Group. He obviously belonged there.

• The lesson here may be that if we want to see a better, more open web, we have to get better at not screwing each other over.