“The RSS 3 Standard is supposed to replace the outdated RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0 by extensively documenting the RSS language, thereby solving common problems with the existing standards. The RSS 1.0 is out of this standard's scope, though it's worth mentioning that 1.0 and 3.0 standards exclude each other due to immense structural differences,” writes Jonathan Avidan at a website he maintains about RSS 3.

The first public draft of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 3 Lite specification has now been released for review and comment. RSS 3 Lite is designed as an "efficient" and "succinct" form of RSS that is meant for aggregators who need just a small amount of metadata to describe a link, Avidan says.

It works by removing features that are considered "irrelevant" to low-end clients. These features have either been removed entirely or made a part of the RSS 3.0 Full specification, which has yet to be released as a first public draft.

Avidan says the Atom syndication standard is also worth mentioning, although he doesn’t address it with RSS 3., currently in development, is out of this standard's scope and does not concern it. Due to contradiction in structure, the standards cannot rely on one another, yet an implementing client should support both standards.

Developers with an interest in RSS 3 Lite are urged to send e-mail to editor@rss3.org with comments in the following areas:

• Spelling error or other errors of editorial sort
• Suggestion of new features or behaviors
• Suggestion of alteration of existing features or behaviors
• Suggestion of removal of existing features or behaviors
• Anything important not described here of which the editor should be informed

Meanwhile, Microsoft rattled this part of the technology world with a mention of  “web feeds” as a name for RSS in the Beta 1 release of Internet Explorer 7. Subsequently, Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble said that Microsoft has never had plans to rebrand RSS. Other nicknames for RSS have been used recently, including “live bookmarks” by Mozilla Firefox, and “feeds” by many others.

Yet any apparent, or even suspected, move by Microsoft to “rebrand” RSS will be met with immediate suspicion by technical community members familiar with Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” philosophy and its fairly recent effort to apply this philosophy to Sun’s Java Programming language.