How I almost invented RSS
Dave Winer, who's known, in spite of his wishes, as the inventor of RSS, wrote recently about the myth of the sole inventor, a topic I spend an entire chapter exploring through research in The Myths of Innovation.
Primarily Winer offers he didn't invent RSS – pointing out, despite what people prefer to think, there were too many contributions to name anyone, including himself, as "the inventor".
This is refreshing, as Invention is often like that scene in the Kirk Douglas film Spartacus, when everyone stands up saying "I am Sparticus! No, I am Spartacus". When an idea succeeds there are often dozens of people claiming to be first, or to have righteous claims (See my review of The Social Network).
As evidence of Winer's excellent point: I worked on a project similar to RSS years before the name RSS was coined. I'd never say I actually invented RSS, instead I'm one of many supporting stories of Winer's point.
Working on IE4 in 1996 we realized browsers were dumb and websites were stingy – they didn't tell us much about how they were organized or updated. We wanted websites to have a smart way to tell browsers about their data and how pages were organized or updated. We created an XML based standard, called Web Collections, and submitted it to the W3C in March 1997. We even shipped one use of the concept in IE 4.0 beta 1, called sitemaps, which led to a U.S. patent.
Sounds impressive perhaps. But at the time few people cared. Even now, clearly, few people care :)
Moreso, Castedo Ellerman, a colleague working on another IE4 project called Channels, submitted a similar use of XML, called CDF, a few days later as part of our push technology offerings.
Netscape followed close behind with MCF in June of 1997 (It's possible they submitted something to the W3C earlier, but I couldn't find it. Hotsauce, the Apple based metadata system they more or less acquired existed earlier but not in a standard based form – links and more accurate history welcome).
Yet wikipedia's history on this matter starts in 1999 – Here's their history of RSS:
RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9.[4] In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91,[2] which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer's scriptingNews syndication format.[7] Libby also renamed RSS "Rich Site Summary" and outlined further development of the format in a "futures document".[8]
Why are Web collections and CDF omitted? The reasons are simple:
The line for when an idea begins is arbitrary.When an idea, inherited from other ideas, becomes it's own concept is not a matter of science but opinion. This is not a crime, but simply convenience. It would take pages of names and ideas to comprehensively identify everyone who pursued any idea, and to sort out which of them knew of what work others were doing.
MSFT abandoned the ideas. My GM cut the sitemap feature, the only real use of web collections. And CDF was known mostly for the ill-fated Channels feature, part of the push technology (which Wired proclaimed would end web-browsing altogether). The uses of the standard's Microsoft made faded – and standards only thrive if they are manifested in software people use.
But this is not an unusual story – the complexity of origins, competitive approaches to a similar idea, and failures of acknowledgment or comprehensiveness is the norm. It's just inconvenient to take a close look at the origins of things, so mostly we never know.
Of course I didn't invent RSS. I almost did, along with many other folks. But I did work on something like it around the same time. Such is the life of people with ideas.
