RSS 3 Lite specification released
According to a story in The Register by Gavin Clarke (“RSS moving to third release”, 02005 08 18), “The first public draft of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 3 Lite specification was released for review and comment on Thursday. RSS 3 Lite is designed as an “efficient” and “succinct” form of RSS that is meant for aggregators who need just a small amount of metadata to describe a link. … RSS 3 is meant to replace the RSS 0.9x standards, which contradict each other, and RSS 2.0, which was seen as a derivative standard with inadequate documentation and poor support of “modern needs”, according to organizers.”
For more information see John Avidan’s RSS Version 3 Homepage and his RSS Version 3 Official Blog. You can read the RSS 3 Lite Specification here.
I don’t think Avidan realized that Aaron Swartz’ text-based RSS 3 was intended as a communal in-joke, so I don’t think Swartz will be coming after him for appropriating the RSS 3 version number. According to Ben Hammersley’s book Content Syndication with RSS (O’Reilly, 2003), “It should be noted that there is an RSS 3.0, proposed by Aaron Swartz as part of [a] long rss-dev in-joke. The joke culminated with a proposal to have RSS 4.0 expressed entirely through the medium of interpretive dance.)”
Now let’s hope Avidan himself is not messing with us.
