The RSS format was preceded by many attempts at syndication that did not become very popular. The simple idea of restructuring information about web sites goes back to as early as 1995, when Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple Computer Group developed the Meta Content Framework The first version of RSS, was created by Guha at web pioneer ;Netscape in 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com site. This version became known as RSS 0.9.In July of 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a upgraded version, RSS 0.91,that simplified and improved the format by removing elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer's scriptingNews syndication format.Libby also changed the name;pos RSS to Rich Site Summary and outlined posible further development of the format in a "futures document".Interestingly,this would be Netscape's last participation in RSS development for eight years. As RSS was being adopted by webmaster who wanted their feeds to be used on My.Netscape.Com and other early RSS portals, Netscape suprisingly dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com in April 2001 as a result of new owner AOL's restructuring of the company.Netscape removed documentation and tools that supported the format.
Two groups emerged to fill the void, without Netscape's help nor approval: The RSS-DEV Working Group nd Winer, whose UserLand Software had made avalable the first publishing tools outside of Netscapes that could read and write RSS.
Winer released a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand web site, covering how it was being used in his company, and also claimed copyright to the document.Months later, UserLand filed a U.S. trademark registration for RSS, but failed to respond to the trademark examiner's request and the request was rejected in December 2001.The RSS-DEV Working Group, a project whose members included Guha and representatives of the O'Reilly Media, produced RSS 1.0 in December 2000.This newer version, which reused the name RDF Site Summary from RSS 0.9, reintroduced support for RDF and added XML namespaces support, adopting several elements from standard metadata vocabularies such as the Dublin Core.
