The proposal to request "application/rss+xml" as the MIME media type for RSS has passed with all 11 members of the RSS Advisory Board voting in favor.
The proposal has been made jointly with the RSS-Dev Working Group, the group that publishes RDF Site Summary.
The application for the media type was made yesterday to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the group that assigns these identifiers.
The board supports the designation of a common MIME type for all versions of RSS, whether the documents use RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication.
IANA's response will be reported here and on the RSS-Public mailing list.
The following proposal has been made by Jon Hanna and Bill Kearney of the RSS-DEV Working Group and Rogers Cadenhead and Greg Smith of the RSS Advisory Board.
Under the advisory board charter, this begins a seven-day discussion period so any interested parties can comment on the proposal. The best place to comment is on the mailing list RSS-Public.
When the discussion period ends, the board will have seven days to vote on it.
Proposal
One of the most reliable ways for software to distinguish different kinds of files on the Internet is through a MIME media type, an identifier that's part of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions standard.
Web servers return a Content-Type header that identifies the kind of file being returned, such as "text/html" for an HTML page, "image/gif" for a GIF graphics file, and "application/atom+xml" for Atom syndicated feeds.
RSS documents lack an an official media type.
If a media type was defined for RSS, when a user opened an RSS feed in a web browser, the browser could open the document with the user's preferred software -- just as browsers crank up an MP3 player when a link to an MP3 is clicked.
Media types must be requested from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority with a formal RFC that chooses the desired type, explains the nature of the content, and describes why the type is needed.
Hanna, Kearney, Smith and I have prepared an application to request "application/rss+xml" as the official media type for RSS documents.
We propose that the RSS-Dev Working Group and RSS Advisory Board
request "application/rss+xml" as the desired media type for RSS
documents and encourage its use for all versions of RSS, whether they use the RDF Site Summary specification or the Really Simple Syndication specification.
Matthew Bookspan, the director of product management for the RSS aggregator developer Attensa, has joined the RSS Advisory Board.
Bookspan worked at Microsoft for nine years and was part of the company's team for Internet Explorer versions 3 and 4. His experience with web content syndication goes back to Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF), an early attempt to foster XML-based content sharing that predates RSS.
He worked on user experience for Microsoft's Windows, Office and SQL Server software and holds several patents for software design. He's a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome to the board, Matthew!
The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software.
Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs.
First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, tagging, an application programming interface and other features.
Shellen's also a member of the PayPal Developers Network Advisory Board and the Social Software Alliance.
Jake Savin has developed software since 2000 for UserLand, so he's been a part of the company during the four years that it published Really Simple Syndication and helped popularize the format.
He's the cocreator of the weblog publishing tools Manila and Radio UserLand, two of the first commercial programs to support RSS, and a content management system for the publisher of MacWeek, MacWorld and MacCentral magazines.
Savin's also a professional musician who runs a mobile recording studio in Dallas that publishes some of its work as podcasts.
Welcome aboard!
The proposal to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 15 members has passed 6-0, with board members Meg Hourihan, Jenny Levine, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Smith and myself voting in favor.
This proposal revises the charter to expand the board and permit deliberations on new members to take place privately, rather than on the mailing list RSS-Board.
The board is an independent organization formed in 2003 that publishes the Really Simple Syndication specification, helps developers create RSS applications and works to broaden public understanding of the format.
If you are involved in RSS as a publisher, programmer, educator or executive and you'd be interested in joining, please contact board chairman Rogers Cadenhead.
