After beginning to implement some RSS feeds on my site it feels like I’ve stumbled into a fragmented scene of competing versions. The scene is much different to working with W3 standards which are generally only published after periods of consultation etc, the development of RSS seems to be going on between competing groups of people with development decisions published on weblogs and implemented almost immediately by the relevant group, Although this is an effective method of driving traffic to certain sites I’m not convinced as to it’s merit for drafting standards which can be implemented uniformly. Without a centralised repository for the specification (or at least one that keeps up with these changes) it is difficult for someone to jump on board immediately and make full use of the exciting possibilities of RSS.
Having said that it’s not all bad news, if you are happy to keep it simple writing RSS that is interoperable between various news aggregators seems to be quite possible. An interesting article I’ve recently come across is the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters, this does a good job of explaining the differences between the two main versions of RSS, 0.9x and 1.0. Another weblog, Dive into Mark, is where I read an interesting article on RSS 2.0.
Well with all this talk of RSS feeds etc I though it might be a good idea to link to the site that demonstrates some of the potential RSS offers, holovaty.com allows readers to submit queries that return a RSS feed of content that matches the keywords submitted. A nicely designed site with interesting material to boot!