Eric van der Vlist and Dan Brickley have released some tools for the creation of web site summary files in the proposed RSS 1.0 format.

Dan Brickley has created an XHTML to RSS extractor, which will automatically generate a site summary file from a collection of XHTML pages. The class tag is used in the XHTML to delimit items and descriptions.

An example XHTML file is provided. The translation service is accessible online.

Eric van der Vlist has made available some Java classes to aid the processing of RSS files, including special RSS-aware SAX drivers. He also includes a converter to generate the proposed RSS 1.0 format from a simple text file of the form:

channel=     http://4xt.org/news/
title=       4xt
description= News 4xt   

Given the recent controversy about the new RSS 1.0 proposal, and particularly about its employment of RDF, it will be interesting to see if these tools ameliorate some of the criticism that RSS 1.0 is "too hard" to write.

Disclosure: Eric van der Vlist is an xmlhack contributor.