The proposal to endorse and publish the RSS Profile has passed 8-1 with RSS Advisory Board members Rogers Cadenhead, Christopher Finke, James Holderness, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin, Paul Querna, Jake Savin and Jason Shellen voting in favor and Matthew Bookspan voting against.
The RSS Profile makes it easier for feed publishers and programmers to implement RSS 2.0, offering advice on issues that arise as you develop software that employs the format. For 18 months, the board worked with the RSS community on interoperability issues, receiving help from representatives at Bloglines, FeedBurner, Google, Microsoft, Netscape, Six Apart and Yahoo. The profile tackles the most frequently asked questions posed by developers:
- How many enclosures can an item contain?
- Are relative URLs OK in item descriptions?
- Is it OK to use HTML in elements other than an item's description?
For the answers, read the sections on enclosures, item descriptions and character data, respectively.
Sam Ruby announced this morning that the Feed Validator now tests for conformance to the profile, offering 11 new checks for improving interoperability.
If you'd like to comment on the profile and the new validator checks, post on the mailing list RSS-Public.
As part of the vote, the following sentence has been added to the About this document section of the RSS specification: "The RSS Profile contains a set of recommendations for how to create RSS documents that work best in the wide and diverse audience of client software that supports the format." No other changes were made and all edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.10.
With the publication of the profile, we're eager to work with companies and individual developers on the adoption of its recommendations. Also, we're looking for people who can write foreign language translations of the document, which has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
The following RSS Advisory Board proposal has been made by Rogers Cadenhead and seconded by Randy Charles Morin.
Under the advisory board charter, the board has seven days to discuss the proposal followed by seven days to vote on it. Interested parties can comment on the proposal on the mailing list RSS-Public.
Proposal
For the last 18 months, the RSS Advisory Board has been drafting a set of best-practice recommendations for RSS. Working with the developers of browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, aggregators such as Bloglines and Google Reader, and blogging tools including Movable Type, we've looked for areas where questions about the RSS format have led to differences in how software has been implemented to produce and consume RSS feeds.
The result of our work is the RSS Profile. The lead authors are James Holderness, Morin, Geoffrey Sneddon and myself. The profile isn't a set of rules; it's a set of suggestions drafted by programmers and web publishers who've been working with RSS since the format's first release in 1999. Our goal is for the profile to be the second document programmers consult when they're learning how to implement RSS.
The profile tackles some long-standing issues in RSS implementation, including the proper number of enclosures per item, the meaning of the TTL element and the use of HTML markup in character data.
In addition to recommendations for the RSS elements documented in the specification, the profile includes advice for four common namespace elements: atom:link, content:encoded, dc:creator and slash:comments.
We propose that the board endorse and publish the RSS Profile, making it available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license so that others can build upon and extend it with their own recommendations.
Additionally, we propose that the following sentence be added to the About this document section of the specification, as a new fifth paragraph: "The RSS Profile contains a set of recommendations for how to create RSS documents that work best in the wide and diverse audience of client software that supports the format."
The proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 5-1 with RSS Advisory Board members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Christopher Finke, Randy Charles Morin and Paul Querna voting in favor, Eric Lunt voting against and members James Holderness, Meg Hourihan, Jenny Levine and Jason Shellen abstaining.
The Extending RSS section of the specification has been clarified with the addition of the words "and attributes" twice in the following sentence:
A RSS feed may contain elements and attributes not described on this page, only if those elements and attributes are defined in a namespace.
No other changes were made. All edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.9.
In RSS Profile research, I analyzed how frequently RSS core elements and namespace elements appear in feeds.
Here's the compiled stats for item elements. Part one covered channel element usage.
The full report reveals that the most popular namespace element in RSS items is dc:creator from the Dublin Core namespace, which appeared in 42.7 percent of the feeds.
The second-most common is wfw:commentRss from the Well-Formed Web namespace, appearing in 34.3 percent. (This total includes wfw:commentRSS, a common miscapitalization of the element name.)
All core elements were found in at least 5 percent of the feeds surveyed with the exception of source, which appeared in 3.0 percent.
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As part of the research for the RSS Profile, I compiled statistics on how frequently RSS core elements and namespace elements appear in feeds.
The full report reveals that the most popular namespace element is dc:language from the Dublin Core namespace, which appeared in 36 percent of the feeds.
The second-most common namespace element is atom:link from the Atom syndication format, appearing in 15 percent.
Four core elements were found in fewer than 1 percent of the feeds surveyed: textInput (0.31 percent), rating (0.26), skipDays (0.10) and the skipDays element day (also 0.10).
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