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.

Congratulations to Sebastian Moser, who correctly guessed that the new menu in Netscape 9 is "News." The News menu (and sidebar) will display stories from the channels at Netscape.com, where the popular articles are decided by the site's members. You can customize which channels are displayed in the menu, and since voting is built directly into the browser, clicking on any of the news items will bring you directly to the story, not to an intermediate Netscape.com page.

That's it for browser news today, but make sure to tune in next week for the biggest browser news yet.

Side note: Take a minute to check out the new My.Netscape, which has been redesigned and is being relaunched today.

At long last, the Netscape team is proud to release a Beta of the next generation My.Netscape, at: http://my.netscape.com

This site will be live tomorrow (Tuesday 3/6).

My.Netscape will retain its identity as a personalized homepage, with a minimum of ad clutter. The initial release will in fact have no ads at all! Our programming staff has worked hard to create a framework that allows for scalability and UI elegance.

We invite any and all feedback on bugs in the product and suggestions for how to better it. We will have a link to a feedback form to help in communicating your thoughts back to the development team, prominently featured at the top of the My Netscape page. We have a long list of extra features that we will add to the My Netscape experience as the weeks go by, but please do let us know how we are doing. We appreciate it!

We are also hard at work at finishing a migration feature that allows previous users of My.Netscape to import their stock portfolio and favorite bookmark preferences. We hope to have that available soon, keep an eye out.

In Figure 1 below, you will see the left side of the My.Netscape screen, including a configured Weather module. The modules can be dragged and dropped to enable easy configuration of your layout. Logging into the site with your existing Netscape.com username and password will allow you to save your module layouts and settings to view them from anywhere.

Figure 1:



In Figure 2, you will see the Add Content layer, which will allow you to easily add modules to your My.Netscape screen. We have just under 100 modules that can be added already, from the mainstream to the off beat, from niche categories to generic widgets. For those who have favorite RSS feeds that aren't listed, you can use our generic RSS feed reader. In most cases, it's as easy as clicking Add!

We hope that all of the folks who patiently waited for this release will enjoy using the new product. There's even a module for a game that many of you requested we resurrect when we launched the new Netscape.com last summer. :-)

Figure 2: