RSS was first introduced by the Netscape. They wanted to use an XML format to distribute news, stories and information.

Netscape refined the version of RSS and then dropped it.

Userland Software to control of the specficiation and continued to develop it releasing a new version in the year 1999.

Here we gives the history of development of the RSS.

1997 - Dave Winer develops scriptingNews. RSS was born.

1999 - Netscape develops RSS 0.90 (which supported scriptingNews). This was simply XML with an RDF Header.

1999 - Dave Winer at UserLand develops scriptingNews 2.0b1 (This included Netscape's RSS 0.90 features)

1999 - Netscape develops RSS 0.91. In this version they removed the RDF header, but included most features from scriptingNews 2.0b1.

1999 - UserLand gets rid of scriptingNews and uses only RSS 0.91

Netscape stops their RSS development

2000 - UserLand releases the official RSS 0.91 specification

2000 - A group lead by Rael Dornfest at O'Reilly develops RSS 1.0. This format uses RDF and namespaces. This version is often confused as being a new version of 0.91, but this is a completely new format with no ties to RSS 0.91

2000 - Dave Winer at UserLand develops RSS 0.92

2002 - Dave Winer develops RSS 2.0 after leaving Userland

2003 - The official RSS 2.0 specification is released

June 19, 2004: RSS 2.0 (version 2.0.1-rv-5), released by RSS Advisory Board

January 25, 2005: RSS 2.0 (version 2.0.1-rv-6), released by RSS Advisory Board

Aug. 12, 2006 (current): RSS 2.0 (version 2.0.8), released by RSS Advisory Board