The RSS specification documents, DTDs, and help files for the first versions of RSS (v0.9, v0.91) are being moved to RSSBoard.org, where they will be hosted by the RSS Advisory Board in perpetuity. Netscape will continue to host these files (via redirect) on the My Netscape domain (my.netscape.com) until August 1st, 2008.

Netscape launched RSS on March 15, 1999, with the My Netscape Network and an RSS 0.90 specification written by Ramanathan Guha. Four months later, RSS 0.91 was launched with a specification written by Dan Libby. Five years after revolutionizing the web browser, Netscape sparked another revolution on the web with XML-based syndication.

All websites that produce RSS 0.9 or RSS 0.91 feeds will need to either convert to using the current standard (RSS v2.0), or if desired, convert their v0.9/v0.91 feeds properly using this guide, provided by the RSS Advisory Board, by August 1st. This is a great opportunity for websites to upgrade to RSS 2.0 though, as the conversion guide mentions:

"You can do a lot more with RSS 2.0 that's not covered here, because the format has become more versatile since its humble origins as Netscape's headline-exchange format in 1999. RSS 2.0 supports podcasting, tagging, XML namespaces and other improvements. The RSS Profile contains our best advice for how to take full advantage of the capabilities of RSS."

Here are some links to relevant documents, now hosted on RSSBoard.org:

RSS v0.9 spec: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-0
RSS v0.9 DTD: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0.9.dtd
RSS v0.9 Help: http://www.rssboard.org/mnn-help
RSS v0.9 FAQ: http://www.rssboard.org/mnn-faq
RSS v0.9 Character Encoding: http://www.rssboard.org/html-entities
RSS v0.9 Troubleshooting: http://www.rssboard.org/mnn-troubleshooting
RSS v0.9 Future Directions: http://www.rssboard.org/mnn-futures
RSS v0.9 Terms of Use: http://www.rssboard.org/mnn-terms-of-use

RSS v0.91 spec: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-1-netscape
RSS v0.91 DTD: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0.91.dtd
RSS 1.0 schema: http://www.rssboard.org/schema-1.0.dtd

For anyone who has questions about upgrading, or need help with RSS 0.9 or RSS 0.91, feel free to post on the RSS Advisory Board's mailing list.

Earlier this week, I wrote about our decision to stop hosting the DTD for RSS 0.91 after July 1, 2007. Since then, we have received a torrent of feedback from users in both support and opposition to our plan. Based on this feedback, we have decided to host this file indefinitely. We apologize for any headaches our initial announcement might have caused.

Nonetheless, if you're a content producer using RSS 0.91 and you are at all concerned about your feeds being dependent upon an external file, we recommend that you consider upgrading to RSS 2.0, which does not require a DTD. While we're proud of it's history as a Netscape innovation, RSS 0.91 is deprecated, and its use should be avoided when possible.

Over the weekend, the tech community noticed that a file crucial to the operation of certain RSS readers was MIA. This file, the DTD for RSS 0.91, had been hosted at my.netscape.com, and its purpose was essentially to explain the structure of RSS 0.91 documents and to provide definitions for a set of character entities that could be used in such documents.

Theoretically, RSS readers load this file when parsing an RSS 0.91 feed. However, In practice, most readers (including those built into Firefox and Internet Explorer) either just ignore the file or load their own cached copy.

my.netscape.com is undergoing a redesign, and when we announced the redesign about 10 days ago, the DNS entry for my.netscape.com was changed to point to the new server where My Netscape will be living. This had the effect of making anything under the old my.netscape.com unavailable, since the only thing public on the new server is a splash page. So, ipso facto, the DTD was no longer available.

The unavailability of this file had the effect of causing certain feed readers - Microsoft's Live.com RSS gadget, for one - to refuse to display RSS 0.91 feeds. This is what we call in the technical community "not good." So, we've restored the file (along with the DTD for RSS 0.9) for the time being, but this experience has raised a few important questions: should feed readers be relying on the availability of a static document on a third-party Web server (and thus a connection to the Internet)? Is it truly necessary to request this document every time an RSS 0.91 feed is being parsed? (The RSS 0.91 DTD is requested over four million times per day - that's a lot of wasted bandwidth for a file that won't ever change.) In our opinion, the answer to both of these questions is no.

So until July 1, 2007, the DTDs for RSS 0.9 and 0.91 will be available via my.netscape.com. If you are a software developer, use this time to ensure that your RSS software is capable of displaying RSS feeds even if the DTD is unavailable, or have a backup copy cached locally for your parser to use in the absence of the specified DTD. If you are a content provider, either update your feeds to point to another copy of the DTD, or accept the fact that your feed may not be available through feed readers that don't have a backup plan in the case of a missing DTD.