What is RSS?

Dave asks: "Why is RSS 1.0 called RSS?"

I've always seen RSS 1.0 as a natural progression from the RSS v0.9x series. Whereas RSS v0.9x required a single brain to say "ok, here are the new changes", RSS 1.0 shifts those changes to the syndication community - allowing anyone to embrace and extend RSS 1.0 with the use of modules and namespaces. For those who don't need that flexibility, they don't need to use RSS 1.0 - plain and simple. This also puts the control back to the community - instead of waiting for someone to add their feature request to the spec, they can develop a module, and be done with it.

As such, RSS 1.0 takes less time (in the long run) to code for, since there's nothing that will say "well, there's a new version of RSS v0.9x out, so I've got to re-code to support the new elements". Instead of people *expecting* aggregators to support the new elements (as could be the case with development in the RSS v0.9x, since it's "in the spec"), people create their own modules for their own use, and often use that metadata within specific applications.

That brings this around to Ben's RDFS paper: the "benefits" of having a community-sponsored extension of RSS 1.0 (with modules) and the "benefits" of having a spearheaded effort with v0.9x can both lend themselves to some sort of auto-describing labeling, as per this RDFS. Most aggregators only support the very basics: items, links, and descriptions - and there's not much else displayed to the user (be they pubDates from the newer .9x's, or dc:date from 1.0). With RDFS, an aggregator can learn how to display newer features of RSS (be they new specs, or new modules) without having to be recoded.