My Netscape Network

» see my.netscape.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Netscape launched My Netscape in May 1998 as its answer to the customizable front pages at Yahoo and MSN, and for most of a year it was an ordinary portal with weather and stock boxes on it. The interesting part arrived in March 1999, when the company opened a thing called My Netscape Network and let outside websites supply the contents of those boxes themselves. If you ran a site, you wrote a small XML file listing your latest headlines with their links and registered it with Netscape. Your readers could then drop those headlines onto their own Netscape page.

The file format was published on 15 March 1999 under the name RDF Site Summary, version 0.90, with Dan Libby as one of its authors. It was theoretically built on RDF and in practice barely was, a point Libby made in the documentation itself when he wrote that in this release of MNN, Netscape had intentionally limited the complexity of the format. In July the company shipped 0.91 with the RDF references taken out, on the grounds that few tools existed to generate or validate any of it, and quietly changed what the letters stood for to Rich Site Summary. Then Netscape stopped.

The year this launched, my own front page was whatever opened when the browser did, and a portal was a thing to click past. Nobody around me had the problem it solved. The part of this that eventually reached me was the small orange square in the corner of every site, years later, with the word Netscape nowhere on it. The question in Turkey in 1999 was never how to arrange other people's headlines on a page of your own, it was whether the line would stay up long enough to finish reading one of them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a channel was ~

A channel was fifteen or twenty lines of XML sitting at a fixed address on your server. It carried a title and a link for the site, a one-line description under them, and then the same small set of fields again for each headline. Netscape's own publishing tool at my.netscape.com/publish walked you through registering one, and the help pages explained the rules in the tone of somebody writing for webmasters who had never seen angle brackets outside of HTML.

The reach was never the portal's traffic. For about two years this was the only widely implemented way for a site to say "here is what I published today" in a form a machine could read, so every syndication scheme that came afterward started from somebody's copy of it.

~ the DTD everybody pointed at ~

RSS 0.91 files declared their type by naming a document type definition that lived on Netscape's own servers, at my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd. Feeds written by people who had never once visited Netscape's portal still opened with a line pointing at that host. After Netscape lost interest the format had no owner at all, and it kept one hard dependency on a URL belonging to a company its parent was in the middle of taking apart.

~ the stub that replaced it ~

The Wayback Machine dates the ending without needing anyone's announcement. my.netscape.com served a full portal page of around ten and a half kilobytes on 5 April 2001. The publishing tool was still alive on the sixteenth, when create_or_edit.tmpl answered, and on the seventeenth, when the disclaimer page did. On 29 April the home page comes back at 322 bytes, and from then on it is a stub of about half a kilobyte. By 1 May the whole /publish/formats/ directory returns a 404.

What happened in that gap was a redesign. AOL was midway through restructuring everything it had bought with Netscape, the new My Netscape dropped RSS and XML support, and the documentation and tools came down with it. The DTD was eventually put back, after enough people complained that their files had stopped validating. The channel program was not.

~ who picked up the format ~

The format survived because it had already escaped. UserLand had been shipping its own tools against RSS 0.91 since 1999 and simply carried on, while a working group that formed around the abandoned RDF idea published RSS 1.0 in December 2000 and Dave Winer's side of the argument ran on through 0.92 to RSS 2.0. Netscape was in none of it. There was nobody left there to ask.

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