Web syndication specifications were preceded by several formats in push and metadata technologies, few of which achieved widespread popularity, as many, such as Backweb and Pointcast, were intended to work only with a single service.
[1] Between 1995 and 1997, Ramanathan V. Guha and others at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework (MCF).
[11] The first standard created specifically for web syndication was Information and Content Exchange (ICE),[12] which was proposed by Firefly Networks and Vignette in January 1998.
[13] The ICE Authoring Group included Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, CNET, National Semiconductor, Tribune Media Services, Ziff Davis and Reuters, amongst others,[14] and was limited to thirteen companies.
[12] ICE was submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium standards body on 26 October 1998,[15] and showcased in a press event the day after.
[23] Like RSS 0.9 (but not 0.91) this was based on the RDF specifications, but was more modular, with many of the terms coming from standard metadata vocabularies such as Dublin Core.
[25] A draft RSS 0.94 surfaced in August, reverting the changes made in 0.93, and adding a type attribute to the description element.
In November 2002, The New York Times began offering its readers the ability to subscribe to RSS news feeds related to various topics.
In July 2003, Winer and Userland Software assigned ownership of the RSS 2.0 specification to his then workplace, Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society.
The effort quickly attracted more than 150 supporters including Dave Sifry of Technorati, Mena Trott of Six Apart, Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal, Jason Shellen of Blogger, Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo!, Timothy Appnel of the O'Reilly Network, Glenn Otis Brown of Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig.
Other notables supporting Atom include Mark Pilgrim, Tim Bray, Aaron Swartz, Joi Ito, and Jack Park.
[4] Also, Dave Winer, the key figure behind RSS 2.0, gave tentative support to the Atom endeavor (which at the time was called Echo.
This version gained widespread adoption in syndication tools, and in particular it was added to several Google-related services, such as Blogger, Google News, and Gmail.
In 2004, discussions began about moving the Atom project to a standards body such as the W3C or the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The Atom Syndication Format was issued as a proposed "internet official protocol standard" in IETF RFC 4287 in December 2005 with the help of the co-editors Mark Nottingham and Robert Sayre.
[29] In December 2005, Microsoft announced in blogs that Internet Explorer 7[30] and Microsoft Outlook 12 (Outlook 2007)[31] will adopt the feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox, effectively making the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for both RSS and related formats such as Atom.
[34] In January 2007, as part of a revitalization of Netscape by AOL, the FQDN for my.netscape.com was redirected to a holding page in preparation for an impending relaunch, and as a result some news feeders using RSS 0.91 stopped working.