Given that RSS eschewed XML & specifically XML namespaces for so long, the idea that RSS ever would have called itself RDF is hilarious to me.
Part of the whole reason Atom (RFC4287) was began was because embedding content inside RSS was a shit show, a disaster, because while it sort of looked like XML and said xml at the top (maybe), the lack of namespaces meant it wasn't safely extensible & putting rich content inside was a huge mixed bag. RDF on the other hand has always been about flexibility & namespaces, about rich data.
Killedbygoogle.com is a good reference, for sure, but this is kind of higher level anti-internet anti-protocols anti-standardization sabotage. This isn't just abandoned product, this is degrading & reducing what used to be a protocol-centric world of newsgroups to a captive, isolated product.
Oh! The plot thickens! TIL RSS 2.0.1 actually got explicit namespace support! Wikipedia:
> RSS 2.0.1 has the internal version number 2.0. RSS 2.0.1 was proclaimed to be "frozen", but still updated shortly after release without changing the version number. RSS now stood for Really Simple Syndication. The major change in this version is an explicit extension mechanism using XML namespaces
RDF was used early on by a lot of sites before moving to one of the later RSS specs. The Simple in RSS was a reaction to the perceived (and actual) complexity of RDF.
There was a schism in the RSS 0.x days. 2.0 is Really Simple Syndication and has a looser approach; RSS 1.0 is RDF Site Summary and tightens things up. Really, if you’re going to generate feeds, you should use Atom or JSON Feed these days. Too much baggage with RSS that makes it difficult to parse unambiguously.
RSS has a complicated history, but the versions you’re most likely most familiar with are maintained by the RSS Advisory Board and state definitively: “Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.”
That said, this is in fact a backronym created when Dave Winer rolled RSS 2.0 out. Check out this link[1] and ask yourself, what happened to RSS 1.0? You could start at the RSS Wikipedia page to investigate further if you’re interested.
I think it's the other way around; Really Simple Syndication is a backronym - for every other historical explanation, I can't see an acronym like being created in the early days of the internet. Once it took hold/potential realised, it needed to be translated to less technical folks.
Perhaps renaming it to something other than "Really Simple" is the first step toward the people paid from online ads and web commercialisation to start adding complexity.
Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds. Or maybe they did and I never saw it.
Also, the idea of "syndication" seems counter to Google's survival. If we can discover the contents of web pages through automated means via RSS, then the need for people to manually submit "searches" to a single company who "crawls" the web and provides "search" seems less vital. How much data about users can be collected from RSS feed subscriptions. If it does not produce lots of data about users, then it's not worth much to many "tech" companies, including Google. Users can navigate from RSS feeds directly to website pages, bypassing these "tech" middleman companies.
> Surprised I never saw anyone try to inject ads into RSS feeds.
Of course people inject ads into RSS feeds. Daring Fireball is a well known example that sells the advertising spot in the open: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
If you’re talking about ads in the body of each entry, I’ve seen that too but can’t give an example off the top of my head. That said, it’s more common for publications to give you a small excerpt instead to lure you back into the ad-laden web page.
Yours truly has a general distrust of web commercialisers renaming things ever since some such company tried to rename Shockwave Flash (.swf) to "Small Web File". Since then I remain continually on guard for further shenanigans.
I've always heard the usage "Really Simple Syndication".
Also, mildly https://killedbygoogle.com/ — if this is intentional, it feels like Google has some vendetta against RSS support in their products.