RDF Site Summary aka. RSS 1.x is an XML-based protocol standard that belongs to the RSS family. It is further based on the RDF standard.

RDF Site Summary resembles a web service used for syndicating articles on web sites and blogs in a "latest news" manner. Articles from RSS-based systems can be read using RSS Feed Readers like WinRSS (http://www.brindys.com/winrss/) or SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) or ClickTheNews (http://www.clickthenews.com/) without the need to check the corresponding web sites or blogs. The RDF Site Summary concept can be compared to e-mail and Newsgroups services.

The original version of RSS was 0.90, designed by Netscape for use on their "My Netscape" portal. It was originally based on RDF, but according to the RSS timeline (http://goatee.net/2003/rss-history.html), Netscape's marketing people caused it to be stripped down. This stripped-down version was renamed Rich Site Summary. Netscape later expanded the format, to add features present in the Scripting News XML format, which was designed by Dave Winer.

Winer maintained the RSS specification, but in the meantime the W3C released their own RSS specification, based on RDF. Rather than adding new terms to RSS, as has been done in later versions of Rich Site Summary, these are added using RDF Schema. Dave Winer, among others, has been critical of this approach, as it adds complexity to RSS.

See also

• Semantic Web
• Web syndication
• Atom

External link

• RDF Site Summary 1.0 (http://purl.org/rss/1.0/) - the main page for the standard