RSS Advisory Board

MNN Future Directions

Archivist's Note: This is documentation that was referenced by the RSS 0.90 specification published by Netscape on March 15, 1999. The current version of the RSS 2.0 specification is available at this link and other revisions have been archived.

In this release of MNN, Netscape has intentionally limited the complexity of the RSS format. However, in the future, Netscape plans to work with other organizations to enhance the RSS format to support additional tags, while making it more compliant with existing W3C standards for XML and RDF.

For example, as shown in Figure 1, Netscape is planning to enhance RSS to support a variety of new features. Such features include a richer metadata description, for more powerful searching and personalization capabilities, subchannels, related channel information, keyword-based collection of data, direct referencing of other RDF structures, PICS ratings, and more.

Please send your comments and suggestions to mnn_feedback@netscape.com.

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Figure 1. Sample file showing the future directions of the RSS feed format.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/"
  xmlns="http://channel.netscape.com/rdf/1.0/">

<NetChannel rdf:ID="1">
  <dc:title>Channel Title</dc:title>
  <dc:description>Channel Description</dc:description>
  <dc:language>Channel Default Language</dc:language>
  <link>Channel Link</link>
  <rating>Channel Default Rating</rating>
  <directoryTopic rdf:about="Top/Sports"/>
  <subChannel rdf:about="2"/>
  <relatedChannel rdf:about="3"/>

  <channelImage>
    <Image>
      <dc:title>Image Title</dc:title>
      <src>Image URL</src>
      <link>Image link</link>
    </Image>
  </channelImage>

  <channelItem>
  <rdf:Seq>
  <rdf:li>
    <Item>
      <dc:title>Item Title</dc:title>
      <dc:description>This article is about</dc:description>
      <dc:language>Item Language</dc:language>
      <dc:subject>keyword 1</dc:subject>
      <dc:subject>keyword 2</dc:subject>
      <link>Item Link</link>
      <rating>PICS Rating</rating>
      <companySymbol>NSCP</companySymbol>
      <companySymbol>AOL</companySymbol>
      <aboutPerson>Jim Barksdale</aboutPerson>
      <aboutPerson>Steve Case</aboutPerson>
    </Item>
  </rdf:li>
  <rdf:li>
    <Item>
      <dc:title>Item 2 Title</dc:title>
      <link>Item 2 Link</link>
    </Item>
  </rdf:li>
  </rdf:Seq>
  </channelItem>

  <channelInput>
    <TextInput>
      <dc:title>Input Title</dc:title>
      <dc:description>Input Description></dc:description>
      <link>Input Link</link>
      <name>Input Name</name>
    </TextInput>
  </channelInput>

</NetChannel>

</rdf:RDF>

Legend:

• Dublin Core tags *
• RDF tags
• RSS 0.9 tags
• Values / miscellaneous

* RSS subscribes to the vocabulary convention of declaring properties names using lowercase characters and declaring resources using an initial uppercase character.