A Feed Is Born

Increasing RSS elements

by Juned on November 22nd, 2007

Ramani Arunachalam suggests that with the increase in the number of shopping sites and blogs in the Interenet there is a need to expand the elements of RSS 2.0 from title, link, and description to a number of other elements needed to sufficiently describe and
tag a product.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) revolutionalized web browsing by specifying a standard syndication format and we are able to read the content of numerous blogs/websites in one feed reader application. Today, there are numerous shopping sites out there. Some of them generate feeds but the basic RSS terms (such as title, link, description) are not sufficient to present all the aspects of the product being sold. Buy.com had already attempted to extend RSS for product attributes by defining a product module for RSS 2.0. But the industry needs to build upon this attempt to come up with a generic and complete specification that is acceptable to many shopping websites. Once it is adopted by many merchants, special feed readers could be developed to aggregate these product feeds and provide advanced search capabilities based on price range, brand name or a combination of product attributes. This could be one step forward towards next generation shopping experience and the “web of data” (as envisioned by the Semantic web).[Source]

Arunachalam specifies a list of elements to be added. It seems to be an all ecompassing one - the list.

Other tidbits -

Arunachalam’s draft is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.

And he is looking for feedback about the proposal. From m All are welcome RSS experts and the expected users, shopping sites, of this revised specification.

DO check out his proposal.

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