The following RSS Advisory Board proposal has been made by Rogers Cadenhead and seconded by Ryan Parman.
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.
Media RSS is a namespace for syndicating audio, video and image files that was created by Yahoo in 2004. The namespace extends RSS support for enclosures to enable a number of different applications, such as video and audio search engines, multiple bitrates and encodings of the same content, artist credits and copyright information, and the ability to play the content with a specified media player.
In the five years since its launch, Media RSS has become highly popular with podcasters and other multimedia publishers and fostered an active development community at the Yahoo Groups mailing list RSS-Media. The namespace is supported by Yahoo Search, Bing, Wikipedia, Flock, Picasa, FriendFeed, Bebo and many other sites and software.
Yahoo, with the participation of members of RSS-Media, recently published version 1.5 of the Media RSS specification.
Over the past year, there have been discussions about the RSS Advisory Board becoming the publisher of the Media RSS namespace to ensure its continued availability and stability, a function the board serves for RSS 0.90 and RSS 0.91. Netscape transferred those specifications to the board in November 2008.
Sapna Chandiramani, a senior engineering manager at Yahoo whose department has responsibility for the Media RSS namespace, has indicated a willingness to have the board take over custodianship.
I propose that the RSS Advisory Board agrees to become the custodian of the namespace, publishing the current version at the permanent URL http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss and archiving past versions.
Additionally, the board offers to manage the RSS-Media mailing list.
Finally, the board resolves that the namespace URI for Media RSS will remain "http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" for as long as it is published to ensure that software using the namespace will continue to function properly.
