24 years ago today Dave Winer introduced Payloads for RSS — which became the structure of the entire podcasting world. If you listen to a podcast, you are using RSS with enclosures. I love the backstory that he disagreed with the premise but Adam Curry “persisted” and convinced him of the value.

RSS already does most of what we want. With the addition of the <enclosure> sub-element of <item> any RSS element can describe a video or audio file (actually any type of file).

<enclosure> has three attributes: url says where the file is located, length says how big it is, and type says what its type is. This way a workstation or aggregator can know in advance, without having to do any communication, what it’s going to get, and apply scheduling and filtering rules.

This is another great example of the power of open protocols and the open web! 🪄