History of web syndication technology
Encyclopedia
This article is specifically dedicated to the history of web syndication technology and, more generally, to the history of technical innovation on many dialects of web syndication feeds
such as RSS
and Atom
, as well as earlier variants such as Channel Definition Format
(CDF) and more recent innovations like GData
.
.
Between 1995 and 1997, Ramanathan V. Guha
and others at Apple's Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework
(MCF). MCF was a specification for structuring metadata information about web sites and other data, and the basis of Project X
(aka Hot Sauce), a 3D flythrough visualizer for the web. When the research project was discontinued, Guha left Apple for Netscape
.
Guha joined Netscape in 1997 and, after meeting XML
co-creator Tim Bray
, decided to turn MCF into an XML application. Guha and Bray jointly adapted MCF to use XML and submitted a specification to the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) in June 1997. This combination of MCF with XML later gave rise to the Resource Description Framework
(RDF). (Tim Bray's own account of this work gives generous credit to Guha.)
In March 1997, Microsoft
submitted a detailed specification for CDF to the W3C. This format was designed for the Active Channel feature of Internet Explorer 4.0
. CDF never became popular, perhaps because of the extensive resources it required at a time when people were mostly on dial-up. Backweb and Pointcast were geared towards news, much like a personal application programming interface
(API) feed. Backweb later morphed into providing software updates, a precursor to the push update features used by various companies now.
In September 1997, Netscape previewed a new, competing technology "Aurora," said to be based on RDF, which CNET.com
stated was based on XML
. A slightly later CNET article describes the October 1997, submission to W3C of a draft for RDF, by a working group that included members from many different companies, including R.V. Guha of Netscape.
In December 1997, Dave Winer
designed his own XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog.
In July 1999, responding to comments and suggestions, Dan Libby produced a prototype tentatively named RSS 0.91 (RSS standing for Rich Site Summary at that time), that simplified the format and incorporated parts of Winer's scripting news format. This they considered an interim measure, with Libby suggesting an RSS 1.0-like format through the so-called Futures Document.
In April 2001, in the midst of AOL's acquisition and subsequent restructuring of Netscape properties, a re-design of the My Netscape portal removed RSS/XML support. The RSS 0.91 DTD
was removed during this re-design, but in response to feedback, Dan Libby was able to restore the DTD, but not the RSS validator previously in place. In response to comments within the RSS community at the time, Lars Marius Garshol, to whom authorship of the original 0.9 DTD is sometimes attributed, commented, "What I don't understand is all this fuss over Netscape removing the DTD. A well-designed RSS tool, whether it validates or not, would not use the DTD at Netscape's site in any case. There are several mechanisms which can be used to control the dereferencing of references from XML documents to their DTDs. These should be used. If not the result will be as described in the article."
Effectively, this left the format without an owner, just as it was becoming widely used.
and mailing list
, RSS-DEV
, was set up by various users and XML notables to continue its development. At the same time, Winer unilaterally posted a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification to the Userland website, since it was already in use in their products. He claimed the RSS 0.91 specification was the property of his company, UserLand Software
.
Since neither side had any official claim on the name or the format, arguments raged whenever either side claimed RSS as its own, creating what became known as the RSS fork.
The RSS-DEV group went on to produce RSS 1.0 in December 2000. Like RSS 0.9 (but not 0.91) this was based on the RDF specifications, but was more modular, with many of the terms coming from standard metadata vocabularies such as Dublin Core
.
Nineteen days later, Winer released by himself RSS 0.92, a minor and supposedly compatible set of changes to RSS 0.91 based on the same proposal. In April 2001, he published a draft of RSS 0.93 which was almost identical to 0.92. A draft RSS 0.94 surfaced in August, reverting the changes made in 0.93, and adding a type attribute to the description element.
In September 2002, Winer released a final successor to RSS 0.92, known as RSS 2.0 and emphasizing "Really Simple Syndication" as the meaning of the three-letter abbreviation. The RSS 2.0 spec removed the type attribute added in RSS 0.94 and allowed people to add extension elements using XML namespaces. Several versions of RSS 2.0 were released, but the version number of the document model was not changed.
In November 2002, The New York Times began offering its readers the ability to subscribe to RSS news feeds related to various topics. In January, 2003, Winer called the New York Times' adoption of RSS the "tipping point
" in driving the RSS format's becoming a de facto standard.
In July 2003, Winer and Userland Software assigned ownership of the RSS 2.0 specification to his then workplace, Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society
.
and "frozen" by the official specification document, which stated that "no significant changes can be made and it is intended that future work be done under a different name".http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss)
In June 2003, Sam Ruby
set up a wiki
to discuss what makes "a well-formed log entry". This initial posting acted as a rallying point. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/23/SamsPie People quickly started using the wiki to discuss a new syndication format to address the shortcomings of RSS. It also became clear that the new format could also form the basis of a more robust replacement for blog editing protocols such as Blogger API and LiveJournal
XML-RPC Client/Server Protocol.
The project aimed to develop a web syndication format that was: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/RoadMap
In short order, a project road map was built. The effort quickly attracted more than 150 supporters including Dave Sifry
of Technorati
, Mena Trott of Six Apart
, Brad Fitzpatrick
of LiveJournal, Jason Shellen of Blogger, Jeremy Zawodny
of Yahoo!
, Timothy Appnel of the O'Reilly Network, Glenn Otis Brown of Creative Commons
and Lawrence Lessig
. Other notables supporting Atom include Mark Pilgrim
, Tim Bray
, Aaron Swartz
, Joi Ito
, and Jack Park. http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/RoadMap#head-74b5d46318b48115b07ab1a2e77cb22df987c284 Also, Dave Winer, the key figure behind RSS 2.0, gave tentative support to the Atom endeavor (which at the time was called Echo.)http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/26
After this point, discussion became chaotic, due to the lack of a decision-making process. The project also lacked a name, tentatively using "Pie," "Echo," and "Necho" before settling on Atom
. After releasing a project snapshot known as Atom 0.2 in early July 2003, discussion was shifted off the wiki.
The discussion then moved to a newly set up mailing list. The next and final snapshot during this phase was Atom 0.3, released in December 2003. This version gained widespread adoption in syndication tools, and in particular it was added to several Google
-related services, such as Blogger, Google News
, and Gmail
. Google's Data APIs (Beta) GData are based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0.
(IETF). The group eventually chose the IETF and the Atompub working group was formally set up in June 2004, finally giving the project a charter and process. The Atompub working group is co-chaired by Tim Bray
(the co-editor of the XML
specification) and Paul Hoffman. Initial development was focused on the syndication format.
The final draft of Atom 1.0 was published in July 2005 and was accepted by the IETF as a "proposed standard" in August 2005. Work then continued on the further development of the publishing protocol and various extensions to the syndication format.
The Atom Syndication Format was issued as a proposed "internet official protocol standard" in IETF RFC 4287 in December 2005 with the help of the co-editors Mark Nottingham
and Robert Sayre
.
, and Cody Woodard produced a preliminary draft of RSS 1.1. It was intended as a bugfix for 1.0, removing little-used features, simplifying the syntax and improving the specification based on the more recent RDF specifications. As of July 2005, RSS 1.1 had amounted to little more than an academic exercise.
In April 2005, Apple released Safari
2.0 with RSS Feed capabilities built in. Safari delivered the ability to read RSS feeds, and bookmark them, with built-in search features. Safari's RSS button is a blue rounded rectangle with "RSS" written inside in white. The favicon
displayed defaults to a newspaper icon.
In November 2005, Microsoft proposed its Simple Sharing Extensions
to RSS.
In December 2005, Microsoft announced in blogs that Internet Explorer 7
and Microsoft Outlook 12 (Outlook 2007) will adopt the feed icon
first used in the Mozilla Firefox
, effectively making the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for both RSS and related formats such as Atom. Also in February 2006, Opera Software
announced they too would add the orange square in their Opera
9 release.
In January 2006, Rogers Cadenhead
relaunched the RSS Advisory Board
in order to move the RSS format forward.
In January 2007, as part of a revitalization of Netscape by AOL, the FQDN for my.netscape.com was redirected to a holding page in preparation for an impending relaunch, and as a result some news feeders using RSS 0.91 stopped working. The DTD has again been restored.
Web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...
such as RSS
RSS
-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
and Atom
Atom (standard)
The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
, as well as earlier variants such as Channel Definition Format
Channel Definition Format
Channel Definition Format is an XML file format used in conjunction with Microsoft Active Channel and Smart Offline Favorites technologies...
(CDF) and more recent innovations like GData
GData
GData provides a simple protocol for reading and writing data on the Internet, designed by Google. GData combines common XML-based syndication formats with a feed-publishing system based on the Atom Publishing Protocol, plus some extensions for handling queries. It relies on XML or JSON as a data...
.
Pre-RSS Formats
Before RSS, several similar formats already existed for syndication, but none achieved widespread popularity or are still in common use today, as most were envisioned to work only with a single service. These originated from push and pull technologies. Two of the earliest examples are Backweb and PointcastPointCast
PointCast may mean:* PointCast , a "Rich UI" & "push technology" company* PointCast Media, a defunct pay per click search feed and keyword advertising company founded in 1996...
.
Between 1995 and 1997, Ramanathan V. Guha
Ramanathan V. Guha
Ramanathan V. Guha is an Indian computer scientist. He graduated with B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, MS from University of California Berkeley and...
and others at Apple's Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework
Meta Content Framework
Meta Content Framework was a specification of a format for structuring metadata about web sites and other data. MCF was developed by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple Computer between 1995 and 1997...
(MCF). MCF was a specification for structuring metadata information about web sites and other data, and the basis of Project X
HotSauce
HotSauce was experimental software developed by Apple Computer as a sample application of its Meta Content Framework. HotSauce generated a 3D visualization of the contents of an MCF file, for example a website sitemap...
(aka Hot Sauce), a 3D flythrough visualizer for the web. When the research project was discontinued, Guha left Apple for Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
.
Guha joined Netscape in 1997 and, after meeting XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
co-creator Tim Bray
Tim Bray
Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Open Text Corporation and Antarctica Systems. Bray was Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems from early 2004 to early 2010. Since then he has served as a Developer Advocate at Google, focusing on...
, decided to turn MCF into an XML application. Guha and Bray jointly adapted MCF to use XML and submitted a specification to the World Wide Web Consortium
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
(W3C) in June 1997. This combination of MCF with XML later gave rise to the Resource Description Framework
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
(RDF). (Tim Bray's own account of this work gives generous credit to Guha.)
In March 1997, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
submitted a detailed specification for CDF to the W3C. This format was designed for the Active Channel feature of Internet Explorer 4.0
Internet Explorer 4
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 is a graphical web browser released in September 1997 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but also with versions available for Apple Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX and marketed as "The Web the Way You Want It".It was one of the main participants of the first...
. CDF never became popular, perhaps because of the extensive resources it required at a time when people were mostly on dial-up. Backweb and Pointcast were geared towards news, much like a personal application programming interface
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
(API) feed. Backweb later morphed into providing software updates, a precursor to the push update features used by various companies now.
In September 1997, Netscape previewed a new, competing technology "Aurora," said to be based on RDF, which CNET.com
CNET.com
CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...
stated was based on XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
. A slightly later CNET article describes the October 1997, submission to W3C of a draft for RDF, by a working group that included members from many different companies, including R.V. Guha of Netscape.
In December 1997, Dave Winer
Dave Winer
Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting...
designed his own XML syndication format for use on his Scripting News weblog.
RSS creation
RDF Site Summary, the first web syndication format to be called "RSS", was offered by Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My Netscape portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9.In July 1999, responding to comments and suggestions, Dan Libby produced a prototype tentatively named RSS 0.91 (RSS standing for Rich Site Summary at that time), that simplified the format and incorporated parts of Winer's scripting news format. This they considered an interim measure, with Libby suggesting an RSS 1.0-like format through the so-called Futures Document.
In April 2001, in the midst of AOL's acquisition and subsequent restructuring of Netscape properties, a re-design of the My Netscape portal removed RSS/XML support. The RSS 0.91 DTD
Document Type Definition
Document Type Definition is a set of markup declarations that define a document type for SGML-family markup languages...
was removed during this re-design, but in response to feedback, Dan Libby was able to restore the DTD, but not the RSS validator previously in place. In response to comments within the RSS community at the time, Lars Marius Garshol, to whom authorship of the original 0.9 DTD is sometimes attributed, commented, "What I don't understand is all this fuss over Netscape removing the DTD. A well-designed RSS tool, whether it validates or not, would not use the DTD at Netscape's site in any case. There are several mechanisms which can be used to control the dereferencing of references from XML documents to their DTDs. These should be used. If not the result will be as described in the article."
Effectively, this left the format without an owner, just as it was becoming widely used.
Initial adoption of RSS (2000–2003)
A working groupWorking group
A working group is an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers working on new research activities that would be difficult to develop under traditional funding mechanisms . The lifespan of the WG can last anywhere between a few months and several years...
and mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...
, RSS-DEV
RSS-DEV Working Group
The RSS-DEV Working Group was the outgrowth of a fork in RSS format development. The private, non-commercial working group began with a dozen members in three countries, and was chaired by Rael Dornfest, researcher and developer of the Meerkat RSS-reader software.-History:RSS-0.90 was released by...
, was set up by various users and XML notables to continue its development. At the same time, Winer unilaterally posted a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification to the Userland website, since it was already in use in their products. He claimed the RSS 0.91 specification was the property of his company, UserLand Software
UserLand Software
UserLand Software is a US software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.-Company History:Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spring of 1988...
.
Since neither side had any official claim on the name or the format, arguments raged whenever either side claimed RSS as its own, creating what became known as the RSS fork.
The RSS-DEV group went on to produce RSS 1.0 in December 2000. Like RSS 0.9 (but not 0.91) this was based on the RDF specifications, but was more modular, with many of the terms coming from standard metadata vocabularies such as Dublin Core
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...
.
Nineteen days later, Winer released by himself RSS 0.92, a minor and supposedly compatible set of changes to RSS 0.91 based on the same proposal. In April 2001, he published a draft of RSS 0.93 which was almost identical to 0.92. A draft RSS 0.94 surfaced in August, reverting the changes made in 0.93, and adding a type attribute to the description element.
In September 2002, Winer released a final successor to RSS 0.92, known as RSS 2.0 and emphasizing "Really Simple Syndication" as the meaning of the three-letter abbreviation. The RSS 2.0 spec removed the type attribute added in RSS 0.94 and allowed people to add extension elements using XML namespaces. Several versions of RSS 2.0 were released, but the version number of the document model was not changed.
In November 2002, The New York Times began offering its readers the ability to subscribe to RSS news feeds related to various topics. In January, 2003, Winer called the New York Times' adoption of RSS the "tipping point
Tipping point
In sociology, a tipping point is the event of a previously rare phenomenon becoming rapidly and dramatically more common. The phrase was coined in its sociological use by Morton Grodzins, by analogy with the fact in physics that adding a small amount of weight to a balanced object can cause it to...
" in driving the RSS format's becoming a de facto standard.
In July 2003, Winer and Userland Software assigned ownership of the RSS 2.0 specification to his then workplace, Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
.
Development of Atom (2003)
As of 2003, the primary method of web content syndication was the RSS family of formats. Members of the community who felt there were significant deficiencies with this family of formats were unable to make changes directly to RSS 2.0 because it was copyrighted by Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and "frozen" by the official specification document, which stated that "no significant changes can be made and it is intended that future work be done under a different name".http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss)
In June 2003, Sam Ruby
Sam Ruby
Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source software projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the feedvalidator.org web service.He currently...
set up a wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
to discuss what makes "a well-formed log entry". This initial posting acted as a rallying point. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/23/SamsPie People quickly started using the wiki to discuss a new syndication format to address the shortcomings of RSS. It also became clear that the new format could also form the basis of a more robust replacement for blog editing protocols such as Blogger API and LiveJournal
LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community....
XML-RPC Client/Server Protocol.
The project aimed to develop a web syndication format that was: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/RoadMap
- "100% vendor neutral,"
- "implemented by everybody,"
- "freely extensible by anybody, and"
- "cleanly and thoroughly specified."
In short order, a project road map was built. The effort quickly attracted more than 150 supporters including Dave Sifry
Dave Sifry
Dave Sifry is an American software entrepreneur and blogosphere icon known for founding Technorati, a leading blog search engine. He also lectures widely on wireless technology and policy, weblogs, and open source software....
of Technorati
Technorati
Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. By June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media...
, Mena Trott of Six Apart
Six Apart
Six Apart Ltd., sometimes abbreviated 6A, is a software company known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting service, and Vox. The company also is the former owner of LiveJournal. Six Apart is headquartered in Tokyo and is planning to open a new, U.S.-based office in New York...
, Brad Fitzpatrick
Brad Fitzpatrick
Bradley Joseph "Brad" Fitzpatrick , is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached....
of LiveJournal, Jason Shellen of Blogger, Jeremy Zawodny
Jeremy Zawodny
Jeremy Zawodny is an incoming employee of Craigslist, having left Yahoo!'s platform engineering group. He has been described as "Yahoo!'s MySQL guru"....
of Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
, Timothy Appnel of the O'Reilly Network, Glenn Otis Brown of Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
and Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...
. Other notables supporting Atom include Mark Pilgrim
Mark Pilgrim
Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of free software. He authors a popular blog, and has written several books including Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Documentation License...
, Tim Bray
Tim Bray
Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Open Text Corporation and Antarctica Systems. Bray was Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems from early 2004 to early 2010. Since then he has served as a Developer Advocate at Google, focusing on...
, Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification...
, Joi Ito
Joi Ito
is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Director of the MIT Media Lab.Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains...
, and Jack Park. http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/RoadMap#head-74b5d46318b48115b07ab1a2e77cb22df987c284 Also, Dave Winer, the key figure behind RSS 2.0, gave tentative support to the Atom endeavor (which at the time was called Echo.)http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/26
After this point, discussion became chaotic, due to the lack of a decision-making process. The project also lacked a name, tentatively using "Pie," "Echo," and "Necho" before settling on Atom
Atom (standard)
The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
. After releasing a project snapshot known as Atom 0.2 in early July 2003, discussion was shifted off the wiki.
The discussion then moved to a newly set up mailing list. The next and final snapshot during this phase was Atom 0.3, released in December 2003. This version gained widespread adoption in syndication tools, and in particular it was added to several Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
-related services, such as Blogger, Google News
Google News
Google News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
, and Gmail
Gmail
Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...
. Google's Data APIs (Beta) GData are based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0.
Atom 1.0 and IETF standardization
In 2004, discussions began about moving the Atom project to a standards body such as the W3C or the Internet Engineering Task ForceInternet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...
(IETF). The group eventually chose the IETF and the Atompub working group was formally set up in June 2004, finally giving the project a charter and process. The Atompub working group is co-chaired by Tim Bray
Tim Bray
Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Open Text Corporation and Antarctica Systems. Bray was Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems from early 2004 to early 2010. Since then he has served as a Developer Advocate at Google, focusing on...
(the co-editor of the XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
specification) and Paul Hoffman. Initial development was focused on the syndication format.
The final draft of Atom 1.0 was published in July 2005 and was accepted by the IETF as a "proposed standard" in August 2005. Work then continued on the further development of the publishing protocol and various extensions to the syndication format.
The Atom Syndication Format was issued as a proposed "internet official protocol standard" in IETF RFC 4287 in December 2005 with the help of the co-editors Mark Nottingham
Mark Nottingham
Mark Nottingham is an influential web infrastructure developer who is one of the authors of the Atom and WS-I Basic Profile specifications, the author of RFC 4229: HTTP Header Registrations, and the chairman of the IETF HTTPBIS Working Group and W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group...
and Robert Sayre
Robert Sayre
Robert Sayre is a software developer who wrote the Atom specification along with Mark Nottingham. Sayre joined Mozilla in 2006, where he worked until 31 May 2011 as an engineering director...
.
Post-Atom technical developments related to web syndication
In January 2005, Sean B. Palmer, Christopher SchmidtChristopher Schmidt
Christopher Riley "Riley" Schmidt is an American actor. He is credited as Riley Schmidt. After college he landed a small role on Passions...
, and Cody Woodard produced a preliminary draft of RSS 1.1. It was intended as a bugfix for 1.0, removing little-used features, simplifying the syntax and improving the specification based on the more recent RDF specifications. As of July 2005, RSS 1.1 had amounted to little more than an academic exercise.
In April 2005, Apple released Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...
2.0 with RSS Feed capabilities built in. Safari delivered the ability to read RSS feeds, and bookmark them, with built-in search features. Safari's RSS button is a blue rounded rectangle with "RSS" written inside in white. The favicon
Favicon
A favicon , also known as a shortcut icon, Web site icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon, is a file containing one small icons, most commonly 16×16 pixels, associated with a particular Web site or Web page...
displayed defaults to a newspaper icon.
In November 2005, Microsoft proposed its Simple Sharing Extensions
Simple Sharing Extensions
FeedSync for Atom and RSS, previously Simple Sharing Extensions, are extensions to RSS and Atom feed formats designed to enable the synchronization of information by using a variety of data sources. Initially developed by Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, it is now maintained by...
to RSS.
In December 2005, Microsoft announced in blogs that Internet Explorer 7
Internet Explorer 7
Windows Internet Explorer 7 is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and was the first major update to the browser in more than 5 years...
and Microsoft Outlook 12 (Outlook 2007) will adopt the feed icon
Feed icon
The Feed icon is for indicating that a web feed is available on a web page. It was originally invented for the use of RSS, but it is also common for Atom and other web feeds now....
first used in the Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
, effectively making the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for both RSS and related formats such as Atom. Also in February 2006, Opera Software
Opera Software
Opera Software ASA is a Norwegian software company, primarily known for its Opera family of web browsers with over 220 million users worldwide. Opera Software is also involved in promoting Web standards through participation in the W3C. The company has its headquarters in Oslo, Norway and is...
announced they too would add the orange square in their Opera
Opera (web browser)
Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
9 release.
In January 2006, Rogers Cadenhead
Rogers Cadenhead
Rogers Cadenhead is a computer book author and web publisher who is currently chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, a group that assists developers in using the RSS 2.0 specification. He graduated from the University of North Texas in 1991 and Lloyd V...
relaunched the RSS Advisory Board
RSS Advisory board
The RSS Advisory Board is a group founded in July 2003 that publishes the RSS 0.9, RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 specifications and helps developers create RSS applications....
in order to move the RSS format forward.
In January 2007, as part of a revitalization of Netscape by AOL, the FQDN for my.netscape.com was redirected to a holding page in preparation for an impending relaunch, and as a result some news feeders using RSS 0.91 stopped working. The DTD has again been restored.