Friday, September 24, 2004 12:16 PM
I always find it fascinating that, upon further review, the latest hyped emerging technology may not be "emerging" after all. Instead, it may simply be a technology that was ahead of its time when it was first introduced, and is just now hitting its stride.
Such is the case with syndication feed standards such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Resource Description Framework (RDF). While headlines concerning these standards have only recently found their way into the mainstream media, the first actual standards can be traced back to the mid-1990's, with MCF and CDF.
Meta Content Framework (MCF) originated in 1995 and was funded by Apple Computer. Used in conjunction with a viewer called Hotsauce, it was in use as early as 1996 and enjoyed some success. For those so inclined, the main architect of MCF, R. V. Guha, still offers a white paper on the subject. When Apple chose to stop funding MCF development, Guha moved to Netscape and MCF evolved into the Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard, which evolved into RDF Site Summary (RSS), which evolved into...you get the idea.
Meanwhile, over in Redmond, Microsoft, along with a company named Pointcast, were developing another data sharing standard they called Channel Definition Format (CDF). This standard was submitted to the W3C in 1997, and you can still find articles in the Microsoft knowledge base concerning the creation and use of CDF files. Still, for all intents and purposes, CDF itself has just seemed to fall along the way. I wouldn't doubt that elements of CDF found their way into other Microsoft offerings, but when leading syndication standards are discussed today, CDF does not make the short list.
Ultimately, in looking first at today's hyped syndication standards and then back ten years to early standards, it is not too difficult to draw a line from standard to standard in an evolutionary tree. And, something tells me that the tree is just now really growing.