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 this mailing list.

Proposal

For the last 18 months, the RSS Advisory Board has been drafting a set
of best-practice recommendations for RSS [1]. 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:

http://www.rssboard.org/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 [2] 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 [3] of the specification, as a new fifth
paragraph:

"The RSS Profile [4] 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."

1: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
2: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#license
3: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#aboutThisDocument
4: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile