Rael Dornfest
Developer
O'Reilly Network

"What we effectively did was, we allowed people to extend RSS both on an ad hoc basis, being able to add tags as they wanted ... while at the same time promoting the concept of standard modules, where folks get together -- those interested in aggregation would get together, those interested in taxonomies would get together, those interested in weblogs would get together -- and come up with modules that suit the purposes of that particular usage or community."

Jonathan Eisenzopf
Chief Technical Officer
Whirlwind Interactive

"A lot of different content providers were using RSS, and they needed to extend it to add new features, such as time stamps for individual items. And what started happening was these content providers were adding these tags and then syndicating these extra tags. And that was making it difficult for aggregators and other users to pull that data into their own news feeds."

R.V. Guha
Developer

"There was a big vision for RSS [at Netscape] ... there was one driving application, the My Netscape Network. The idea was that instead of having a small fixed number of channels, My Netscape Network would have a large number of channels the user would pick from. ... The definition of the channels themselves, they wanted that to be highly flexible. ... A user could basically define their channels.... the idea was to step away from the single linear hierarchical structuring to allow for richer and richer aggregations and re-aggregations and re-re-aggregations and slicing and dicing of data."

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