RSS Advisory Board

RSS Change Notes

Archivist's Note: This documentation applies to all revisions of the RSS 2.0 specification from RSS 0.92 through the current version.

1. March 30, 2009: In the Optional Channel Elements section, the text of the skipHours and skipDays documentation has been moved verbatim into the specification, with the exception that "An XML element" has been revised to "This element".
2. March 30, 2009: In the TTL section, the broken link on the word Gnutella has been removed.
3. March 30, 2009: In the Comments section, the link to the use-case for this element has been updated to a document hosted by the board.
4. March 30, 2009: In the Enclosures section, the link to the use-case for this element has been updated to a document hosted by the board.
5. March 30, 2009: In the About this document section, the first two paragraphs have been revised to this text: "This document represents the current status of RSS, incorporating all changes and additions starting with the basic spec for RSS 0.91 (June 2000) and follows RSS 0.92 (December 2000), RSS 2.0 (August 2002), and RSS 2.0.1 (July 2003)."
6. March 30, 2009: In the About this document section, this sentence has been added: "RSS documents can be tested for validity in the RSS Validator."
7. Oct. 15, 2007: In the About this document section, a new fifth paragraph has been added to the end: "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."
8. June 5, 2007: In the Extending RSS section, the words "and attributes" were added twice to clarify this 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."
9. Aug. 12, 2006: In the comments section, encourage people to look for help implementing RSS on the RSS-Public mailing list instead of the inactive RSS2-Support list.
10. Aug. 12, 2006: Updated the docs example to use the permanent URL of the specification.
11. January 25, 2005: In the Elements of <item> section, three examples were changed and six examples were removed to improve the formatting of the spec.
12. June 19, 2004: Added link to encoding examples in Elements of <item> per the proposed clarification.
13. May 31, 2004: Thanks to mickman at RSSQuotes for reporting errors in the docs page for skipHours and skipDays. The text had three unencoded left-angle brackets. Now the docs are much easier for humans to parse.
14. May 31, 2004: In the Sample files section, the example RSS 2.0 file has been updated.
15. April 6, 2004: Added pointer to RSS version history to What Is RSS section.
16. July 17, 2003: Removed UserLand copyright and disclaimer from the spec hosted at Harvard. Archived here. Removed the link to the copyright and disclaimer at the head of the RSS 2.0 spec.
17. July 17, 2003: In What is RSS, changed "RSS is dialect" to "RSS is a dialect".
18. July 17, 2003: RFC 822 is specific that hours are two digits. Some of the date examples use 1-digit hours, as in 9:42:31. Changed to 09:42:31.
19. July 17, 2003: Changed example for <cloud> to a fictitious server, rpc.sys.com.
20. July 17, 2003: Changed spelling of propogate to propagate.
21. July 17, 2003: Change "It's used in the post command in the Radio UserLand aggregator," to "It can be used in the post command of an aggregator."
22. July 17, 2003: Moved SOAP Meets RSS document.
23. July 15, 2003: Added License and Authorship section at the end of the spec.
24. July 15, 2003: First publication of the specification by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.
25. July 14, 2003: Added Jeffrey Zeldman quote to What is RSS? section.
26. April 4, 2003: The example for comments had an incorrectly encoded value. Thanks to Simon Willison for pointing this out.
27. Jan. 21, 2003: Added <rating> to the 2.0 spec in the Optional Channel Elements section using the text and link from the RSS 0.91 (UserLand) spec. Somehow in the editing process for the 2.0 spec the docs for this element were dropped.
28. Nov. 11, 2002: Phil Ringnalda points out that the current spec disagrees with the Netscape spec on whether the <hour> sub-element of <skipHours> is 1-based or 0-based. Netscape says 0, we say 1. The skipHours and skipDays documentation has been changed to agree with Netscape.
29. Nov. 6, 2002: David Peckham points out that the first two paragraphs in the Comments section are at odds with each other. He's absolutely right. The second paragraph should have been deleted. It says "RSS places restrictions on the first non-whitespace characters of the data in <link> and <url> elements. The data in these elements must begin with http:// or ftp://. Among others, https:, file:, mailto:, news:, and javascript: are not permitted." It has been deleted.
30. Oct. 1, 2002: Added link to IANA-registered URI schemes to the first item in the Comments section, clarifying the spec to document current practice.
31. Oct. 1, 2002: In the What is RSS? section, specifically say that the version must be 2.0. The basic theory is this. Subsequent versions, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, etc are just clarifications of the spec, not changes to the format. Therefore the version attribute should be 2.0. This keeps it simpler for aggregators as well.
32. Oct. 1, 2002: Revise Roadmap to account for the fact that 2.0.1 has been released.
33. Oct. 1, 2002: Point to the RSS2-Support list from the Comments section.
34. Oct. 1, 2002: Review Sean Palmer's comments on the 2.0 spec.
35. Oct. 1, 2002: Extending RSS. Implement Phil Ringnalda's Proposal One from this post on the RSS2-Support list. (Clarify what was said in the 2.0 spec, explain why elements are not in a namespace.)
36. Oct. 1, 2002: New sample file, <rss> element without namespace. Include Mark Pligrim's example in the section on extending RSS.
37. Sept. 18, 2002: Removed caveat, text follows: "This is a draft. Until this comment disappears, consider this a draft, a work in progress. Comments are welcome, but don't assume that this document is final or authoritative. Please don't base any implementations on what you read here. That said, I'll probably remove this caveat sometime during the second week of September. 8/30/02; 6:55:37 AM by DW."
38. Sept. 18, 2002: Added 2.0 example file.
39. Sept. 18, 2002: Changed language about dates to allow four-character years.
40. Sept. 18, 2002: The <language> element can use values as defined by the W3C. The Netscape 0.91 spec allowed for it, this change fixes an editing error in 2000.
41. Sept. 18, 2002: Default value of isPermaLink attribute of <guid> changed from false to true.
42. Sept. 18, 2002: Add Estonian, Hawaiian to the list of allowable languages.
43. Sept. 18, 2002: Specifically allow as many category elements as needed. This was assumed but not stated in previous specs.
44. Sept. 18, 2002: <category> can be a sub-element of <channel>.
45. Sept. 18, 2002: <comments> sub-element of <item>.
46. Sept. 18, 2002: <generator> sub-element of <channel>.
47. Sept. 18, 2002: <author> sub-element of <item>.
48. Sept. 18, 2002: <ttl> sub-element of <channel>.
49. Sept. 18, 2002: <pubDate> sub-element of <item>.
50. Sept. 18, 2002: <guid> sub-element of <item>.
51. Sept. 18, 2002: <image> is optional.
52. Sept. 18, 2002: New roadmap section of specification.
53. Sept. 18, 2002: The document is also available in OPML format.
54. Sept. 18, 2002: RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.
55. Dec. 25, 2000: <source> sub-element of <item>.
56. Dec. 25, 2000: <category> sub-element of <item>.
57. Dec. 25, 2000: <enclosure> sub-element of <item>.
58. Dec. 25, 2000: <cloud> sub-element of <channel>.
59. Dec. 25, 2000: All sub-elements of <item> are optional.