Fact-Check: Who Created RSS?. A fact-checker from Business 2.0 contacted me this week, seeking clarification about who created RSS for an upcoming story on podcasting.
My response:
A few years ago, I did some research on this subject for the
preparation of a book on weblogging software.
The creation of RSS is a huge can of worms. One of the ironies of the format is how well it spreads arguments about itself.
My take, as someone who was around when no one cared who took
credit: RSS was co-created by Netscape and Dave Winer.
In 1997, Winer introduced a site syndication format called
scriptingNews, a simple XML dialect for viewing a Web site with
different browsers.
Two years later, Netscape offered RSS 0.9, a more complex XML
dialect for syndication that used the Resource Description
Framework (RDF), an XML standard created by the World Wide Web
Consortium to make it easier for software to mine documents for
information.
Later that year, Netscape dropped RDF from RSS, releasing a new
simplified version, 0.91, that adopted elements of scriptingNews
format and publicly acknowledged Winer's contribution. To support
the effort, Winer dropped his format and threw his considerable
energy for evangelism behind RSS.
That protocol lives today as RSS 2.0.
If not for Winer, it wouldn't matter who created RSS, because the
format would be as dead as Channel Definition Format, an early
attempt at site syndication by Microsoft. When Netscape gave up
on RSS and dropped the specification page from its site, Winer
promoted it relentlessly on his weblog and in his software,
Frontier and Radio UserLand.
Full disclosure: I'm a member of the RSS Advisory Board, the
group that shepherds the RSS 2.0 specification, and have worked
on a weblog hosting project with Winer. So at this point I'm closely associated with one side of the debate. [Workbench]
12:40:11 AM 
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