Which says: "This document is maintained by Aaron Swartz of watchdog.net on behalf of the RSS-DEV Working Group." This suggests somewhat of a lesser role, although maintaining the document is still not insignificant.
However if you follow the other link on the yahoo message page (which is described as "a working group on the
newly-created RSS-DEV mailing list") to http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/ then Aaron is listed as a member of the working group.
I would interpret this as roughly that initially Aaron was a "maintainer of the document" up to the point it was initially released, and then became part of the working group that presumably did modify/maintain the document after its initial release. And I would hazard a guess that he made contributions that were the impetus for changing his role from "maintainer of the document" to member of the working group.
My point being that the link DW posted for RSS 1.0 does actually point to Aaron's contribution, just at one remove.
Wow. You inferred an intent that's far too insidious and specific. Literally, the first sentence of the post provided the context. People were asking me what happened with RSS. Some reporters take their jobs seriously, and before they write a story, want to -- you know -- find out what actually happened.
So they ask me. I don't do interviews. But I will, if asked, write a blog post. Which is what I did.
What I wrote in 2003 was all I knew about the origins of RSS at the time. I pointed to the mail list that did the work on RSS 1.0. I was not, myself, an active participant in that process. So I didn't know all the ins and outs, esp since the initial work was done in private. My guess is the originators of the format didn't know Aaron until he showed up on the mail list. But that's just a guess.
I don't think it all matters very much. But I did have information that the reporters wanted, so I provided it.
Why that is poor taste is beyond my ability to understand. Maybe you should write a more detailed post explaining.
Par for the course: Winer is obsessed by not being recognised for his contributions to the world of angle brackets and highly-politicised markup standards. It borders on (and probably over) the pathological.
Aaron was on his long list of "enemies", so I'm not too surprised by his reaction. I actually expected him to come out saying "well, actually, RSS 1.0 was kind of a dead end, we threw it all out with 2.0" and so on and so forth.
He didn't just co-author RSS, he used it extensively. Not only did he maintain a powerful blog, he made an RSS feed for Paul Graham's site. I hope he felt proud of this achievement.
He posted this today - which I found to be in shockingly poor taste: http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/january/rssHistory
The kid commits suicide, and his first reaction is to post a link to his "official" history of RSS....