Howdy Folks,

Well, the RSS-DEV Working Group[1] has released RDF Site Summary (RSS)
1.0, the first revision of RSS since 0.91 in July, 1999.

I feel this an appropriate time for a quick redux of how this has all come
together...

The Journey
-----------

The journey itself, despite feeling like a lifetime at times, has been
rather short. The RSS-DEV Working Group was created on July 27, 2000[1]
-- a scant four months from proposal to release.

The road was difficult at times. Controversy over the "ownership" of RSS
and whether or not it needed extending took quite a bit of energy. With a
subscribership of around one-hundred thirty, finding the devil in the
details or getting lost in a maze of minutiae was par for the course.
Wearing multiple hats -- writer, theoretician, programmer, and end-user --
usually stacked one on top of another has been quite a juggling act.

The Education
-------------

But we also all learned an amazing amount. It's not until you tackle a
project like this that you learn just how much thought, learning, balance,
and coordination it takes.

* We now know more about RDF (warts and all) than we ever suspected was
even there.

* We've worked hard to balance in-depth discussion projected out to the nth
degree and maintaining understandability in our discussions and
simplicity in our specification.

* Our Policies and Procedures[2] were a grand experiment in openness and
co-existence of Interest Group and Working Group. Even the introduction
and adoption of these procedures themselves required a bootstrapping leap
of faith.

* We've a Working Group members spread across the US, UK, and France and
an Interest Group from around the globe. And WG members were often
bouncing around from continent to continent, yet seldom in the same
place at the same time. Whenever possible, we've tried to meet up; I've
now met 7 of the 12.

* Managing to keep conversation flowing and even-keeled despite
differences of opinion, and environmental influces required great
quantities of patience, understanding, interest, and support.

* We've kept (for the most part ;-) up to date on the ocean of email
(1300 messages at last count) open-issues (and their many possible
solutions), polls, votes, and more.

It's amazing how much a few dedicated people in disparate locations can
accomplish by volunteering some of their "copious free time."

Where We Are
------------

RSS 1.0 was just finalised on December 6, 2000 by Working Group vote[3].
Implementation has been strong for some time already, with RSS
1.0-compliant tools, libraries, articles, and feeds springing up (and
evolving) along the way...

* Online Converters[4]:
- RSS2RDF converts RSS 0.9 or 0.91 to 1.0 on-the-fly
- An XHTML to RSS 1.0 service generates an RSS 1.0 document using
information extracted from XHTML pages. By making use of a small
set of style classes, any XHTML page becomes an instant RSS feed.
- A Web form-based RSS converter reads and writes RSS 0.9, 0.91, and
1.0
- Redland, an RDF system, parses RSS 1.0 feeds as RDF and displays
them as HTML
- Squish is a Java implementation of an RDF Query; an online demo
allows the creation and display of an RSS 1.0 document

* Open Source Tools and Libraries[5]:
- Perl XML::RSS module
- Orchard/RSS, a simple, powerful API for RSS in Python
(and other languages soon)
- RSSmanip, an ASP library transforms RSS 1.0 feeds into HTML,
HDML or WML
- Style-to-1.0 -- stylesheets and Java tools to convert RSS 0.9, 0.91,
and XHTML to RSS 1.0
- Java text-to-rss produces a well-formed RSS 1.0 document from a
user-friendly plain-text format
- A SquishDot DTML Method (for Zope) to produce an RSS 1.0 feed
- RSS2RDF, a converter between RSS 0.9 or 0.91 and 1.0 in C
- RSS support in Jena, an experimental Java API for RDF
- ForumZilla is a Mozilla/Netscape 6 XUL application for reading Web
discussion forums in a Usenet newsreader-like interface via RDF
descriptions of the forums, their articles, and threaded replies.

* News, Articles and Tutorials galore[6]
- The O'Reilly Network's RSS DevCenter[7]
- RSS Info[8], News and information on the RSS format
- xmlhack[9]

* Feeds[10]
- Meerkat, W3C, O'Reilly Network, XMLfr, 4xt, MonkeyFist, just to
name a few.

Where Next?
-----------

Now the fun part begins. We can start getting together in smaller groups
and designing modules for our particular needs -- aggregation, taxonomy,
discussion, threading, annotation, content, job listings, housing listings,
replication, searching, ...

Bringing all of the implementation and documention up to code.

And then there's the evangelism!

So, now that the easy part is over ;-), let's get to work...

Rael

--

[1] http://www.egroups.com/message/rss-dev/17
[2] http://www.egroups.com/files/rss-dev/RSS-DEV+Policies+and+Procedures
[3] http://www.egroups.com/surveys/rss-dev?id=444214
[4]
http://www.egroups.com/links/rss-dev/Tools_000966119199/Online_Converters_000966\
847112/
[5] http://www.blogspace.com/rss/tools

http://www.egroups.com/links/rss-dev/Tools_000966119199/RSS_1_0_Compliant_000966\
119948/
[6] http://www.egroups.com/links/rss-dev//Articles__Tutorials__000967273980/
[7] http://www.oreillynet.com/rss/
[8] http://www.blogspace.com/rss/
[9] http://xmlhack.com/search.php?q=rss
[10] http://www.blogspace.com/rss/writers

------------------------------------------------------------------
Rael Dornfest rael@...
Maven, http://www.oreillynet.com/~rael
The O'Reilly Network http://meerkat.oreillynet.com
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