RSS vs RSS2 | Rss 1.0 vs RSS 2.0
Web feeds are used to publish (in a standard format) information regarding frequent updates like new entries in blogs, breaking news and multimedia to its subscribed readers. Web feeds are very important to publishers because they can automate the syndication process. Web feeds are important for readers because they don’t need to keep track of updates manually. Web feeds can also aggregate many feed to one place. Web feeds can be viewed through feed readers (such as Google Reader). RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is one of the most popular web feed formats used today. RSS2 (RSS 2.*) is its latest version, which was the successor to its initial version RSS (RSS 1.*). Feed, web feed and channel are the other terms that are used to call a RSS document. RSS document is made up of the full content or the summery along with the metadata (date, author, etc.). Because a standard XML format is used for publications, it allows to be viewed by many applications (after publishing just once).
What is RSS?
RSS 1.* versions are simply identified as RSS. The initial original version is the RSS 0.90, which was introduced by Netscape. At that time, RSS stood for RDF Site Summary. In December 2000, RSS-DEV working group introduced RSS 1.0, which is sometimes identified as RSS (instead of RSS 1.*). RSS 1.1 was a later version, which replaced RSS 1.0. However, this was not endorsed by RSS-DEV Working Group. RSS includes support for XML namespaces. RSS was the first web feed to introduce permissions for carrying audio files, which paved the way for the rapid popularity of podcasts.
What is RSS2?
RSS2 is a collection of RSS versions identified as RSS 2.*. Under this, RSS 0.91 is a simplified release by Netscape. There are several other closely related versions such as RSS 0.92, 0.93 and 0.94 in RSS 2.*. RSS 2.0 was released in September 2002. The name was also changed to Really Simple Syndication with that release. The type attribute (which was added in RSS 0.94) was removed in RSS 2.0. Furthermore, RSS 2.0 started supporting namespaces. But namespace support is applicable only to the other content available inside RSS 2.0 feed (excluding RSS 2.0 elements). This was done intentionally to preserve the backward compatibility with RSS 1.*. Copyright of RSS 2.0 was assigned to Harvard, in July 2003. Around the same time, the official RSS Advisory Board (a group that acts as the governing body for the maintenance of the RSS specification) was formed. RSS 2.0.1 introduced the major change of extension mechanism using namespaces in XML.
What is the difference between RSS and RSS2?
RSS2 introduced the support for enclosures, which was not present in RSS. Because of this, RSS2 is the most popular feed type for podcasting. This is evident by the fact that iTunes started using RSS2 very recently. But now, an enclosure extension called mod_enclosure is available for RSS. RSS2 does not support full-text, but RSS’s markup is used as an extension. Unlike RSS, RSS2 provides support for entity-encoded HTML.