Rael Dornfest has announced a proposal for RSS 1.0, the next generation of the metadata and syndication format originally created for the My Netscape portal.

Initially created by a group of developers including RDF experts Dan Brickley and R.V. Guha, the new proposal seeks to provide an extensible way forward for the RSS format. The rapid adoption of RSS 0.9 and 0.91 highlighted frustration among developers and authors for whom the descriptive abilities of those formats was too limited.

Labelled a "specification proposal", the spec will be tested and matured in a new public working group, hosted at eGroups.

The most radical change in this new version is a reversion to the use of RDF, which the original team at Netscape used initially and then moved away from. The use of RDF and XML Namespaces has enabled a modular framework, allowing developers to plug in RSS 1.0 module vocabularies for their applications (current examples include Dublin Core descriptions, categorization, and syndication elements).

Validators and conversion tools for the new format will be released imminently. Support for RSS 1.0 is included in the latest XML::RSS Perl module, due for release to CPAN today, and available also from the RSS-DEV files area.

Further coverage:

• RSS moves forward