The simplicity of a new technology mostly relies relies mostly on the
simplicity and availability of practical tools.

In order to allow the RSS authors to use their favorite tool to describe
their RSS channels, the authors of the RSS 1.0 proposal are encouraging
the development of simple conversion tools available both as online
services and downloadable for offline use:

* Dan Brickley announces a prototype XHTML to RSS 1.0 online extractor
service [1].

The service generates an RSS 1.0 document using information extracted
from XHTML pages. By making use of a small set of style classes [2], any
XHTML page becomes an instant RSS feed.

The extractor's core is a stylesheet [3] developed by Eric van der Vlist
and should work with any online XSLT service. Initially, the system
makes use of a public XSLT transformation server provided by W3C.

[1] http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2000/08/hss/sw.html
[2] http://4xt.org/downloads/rss/xhtml-to-10.txt
[3] http://4xt.org/downloads/rss/xhtml-to-10.xsl

* Eric van der Vlist announces new stylesheets and Java tools [4] to
create RSS 1.0 documents.

In addition to the conversion tools for RSS 0.9 and RSS 0.9.1 previously
available, this new release includes the XHTML to RSS 1.0 stylesheet
used by Dan Brickley's extractor and a generator using a simple text
format [5] as its input source.

This generator allows RSS authors to describe their channel in a user
friendly plain text format using any text editor while taking care of
producing a well formed RSS 1.0 document.

[4] http://4xt.org/downloads/rss/
[5] http://4xt.org/downloads/rss/text-to-10.txt

More implementations of online conversion tools and mirror sites will be
announced soon.

Dan Brickley (Daniel.Brickley@...)
Eric van der Vlist (vdv@...)