Start Time: 19.25
Netscape introduced RSS 0.9, one of the first RDF vocabularies, as a general site summary vocabulary in order to syndicate headlines on their "My.Netscape" portal. It was rapidly followed by RSS 0.91 with more syndication features, but leaving out its RDF syntax. Both releases are still widely used as a syndication vocabulary, used by portals such as Userland, Moreover, and Meerkat; but the vocabulary seemed to have reached a dead end by mid-2000.
After the additions of RSS 0.91, the language had lost its focus, many requests for improvement were made without any structure and selection process to advance them, and these requests were pushing in different directions with a risk of loosing still more focus.
More importantly, there was no plan nor method to add metadata.
The RSS 1.0 Working Group (Gabe Beged-Dov, Dan Brickley, Rael Dornfest, Ian Davis, Leigh Dodds, Jonathan Eisenzopf, David Galbraith, R.V. Guha, Ken MacLeod, Eric Miller, Aaron Swartz and myself, Eric van der Vlist) was created with the charter of defining an extensible specification, built on a refocused RDF core vocabulary and a mechanism facilitating the construction of specific modules.
The RSS 1.0 specification (http://purl.org/rss/1.0/) was published in December 2000, together with a Dublin Core module and a set of supporting tools. A taxonomy module is under discussion, and the format used by XMLfr is based on the current Working Draft.
From XMLNews-Story to RSS 1.0
XMLfr's RSS 1.0 channels are generated by an XSLT transformation out of three different sources of information:
An RSS channel template without any items, and the reference of
the contents of a directory stored as XML, pointing to
the XMLNews-Story documents.
The XMLNews-Story element described by the path /nitf/body/body.head contains information that is needed to describe an RSS item, including Dublin Core (DC) elements such as dc:creator, dc:date, dc:description.
The interesting potential of using XMLNews-Story is the possible use of the inline markup to generate more semantic information than is simply specified in the header. XMLfr uses three of these elements that are pertinent to its domain: org, person, and object.title. Extracting these elements allows the generation of dc:object elements in the RSS item's properties to provide a list of keywords for an article. Here's a fragment from an article on XMLfr that shows these elements in use.
