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RSS 2.0 Change Notes

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

6/19/04 DW 

 Added link to encoding examples in Elements of per the proposed clarification.

5/31/04 DW 

 Thanks to mickman at RSSQuotes for reporting errors in the docs page for skipHours and skipDays. The text had three unencoded left-angle brackets. Now the docs are much easier for humans to parse.

5/31/04 RC 

 The sample RSS 2.0 file has been updated.

4/6/04 DW 

 Added pointer to RSS version history to What Is RSS section.

7/17/03 by DW 

 Removed UserLand copyright and disclaimer from the spec hosted at Harvard. Archived here. Removed the link to the copyright and disclaimer at the head of the RSS 2.0 spec.

 In What is RSS, changed "RSS is dialect" to "RSS is a dialect".

 RFC 822 is specific that hours are two digits. Some of the date examples use 1-digit hours, as in 9:42:31. Changed to 09:42:31.

 Changed example for to a fictitious server, rpc.sys.com.

 Changed spelling of propogate to propagate.

 Change "It's used in the post command in the Radio UserLand aggregator," to "It can be used in the post command of an aggregator."

 Added License and Authorship section at the end of the spec.

 Moved SOAP Meets RSS document.

7/15/03 by DW 

 Copied spec from UserLand to Harvard.

7/14/03 by DW 

 Added Zeldman quote to What is RSS?

4/4/03 by DW 

 The example for had an incorrectly encoded value.

 Thanks to Simon Willison for pointing this out.

1/21/03 by DW 

 Added to the 2.0 spec in the Optional Channel Elements section using the text and link from the 0.91 spec. Somehow in the editing process for the 2.0 spec the docs for this element were dropped.

11/11/02 DW 

 Phil Ringnalda points out that the current spec disagrees with the Netscape 0.91 spec on whether the sub-element of is 1-based or 0-based. Netscape says 0, we say 1. I changed our spec to agree with Netscape.

11/6/02 DW 

 David Peckham points out that the first two paragraphs in the Comments section are at odds with each other. He's absolutely right. The second paragraph should have been deleted.

 It says "RSS places restrictions on the first non-whitespace characters of the data in <link> and <url> elements. The data in these elements must begin with http:// or ftp://. Among others, https:, file:, mailto:, news:, and javascript: are not permitted."

 I deleted it.

2.0.1 -- 10/1/02 DW 

 Added link to IANA-registered URI schemes to the first item in the Comments section, clarifying the spec to document current practice.

 In the What is RSS? section, specifically say that the version must be 2.0. The basic theory is this. Subsequent versions, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc are just clarifications of the spec, not changes to the format. Therefore the version attribute should be 2.0. This keeps it simpler for aggregators as well.

 Revise Roadmap to account for the fact that 2.0.1 has been released.

 Point to the RSS2-Support list from the Comments section.

 Review Sean Palmer's comments on the 2.0 spec.

 Extending RSS. Implement Phil Ringnalda's Proposal One from this post on the RSS2-Support list. (Clarify what was said in the 2.0 spec, explain why elements are not in a namespace.)

 New sample file, <rss> element without namespace. Include Mark Pligrim's example in the section on extending RSS.

 Archived 2.0 spec as an OPML file.

2.0 -- 9/18/02 DW 

 Removed caveat, text follows..

 This is a draft

 Until this comment disappears, consider this a draft, a work in progress.

 Comments are welcome, but don't assume that this document is final or authoritative.

 Please don't base any implementations on what you read here.

 That said, I'll probably remove this caveat sometime during the second week of September.

 8/30/02; 6:55:37 AM by DW

 Added 2.0 example file.

 Changed language about dates to allow four-character years.

 The element can use values as defined by the W3C. The Netscape 0.91 spec allowed for it, this change fixes an editing error in 2000.

 Default value of isPermaLink attribute of changed from false to true.

 Add Estonian, Hawaiian to the list of allowable languages.

 Specifically allow as many category elements as needed. This was assumed but not stated in previous specs.

  can be a sub-element of .

 <comments> sub-element of .

 <generator> sub-element of .

 <author> sub-element of .

 <ttl> sub-element of .

 <pubDate> sub-element of .

 <guid> sub-element of .

  is optional.

 New roadmap section of specification.

 The document is also available in OPML format.

 RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.

0.94 

 This version was not deployed.

0.93 

 This version was not deployed.

0.92 

 <source> sub-element of .

 <category> sub-element of .

 <enclosure> sub-element of .

 <cloud> sub-element of .

 All sub-elements of are optional.



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