Adding author context to RSS (Coywolf)

Jon Henshaw's May 2026 note on Coywolf covering the Byline proposal — a new namespace for RSS / Atom / JSON Feed that adds structured identity for the people behind the posts. The spec is the work of Terry Godier, the developer behind two RSS reader apps (Sourcefeed and Current); Henshaw's contribution is mostly to surface it to a wider audience while it's still under consideration.

What's actually in the proposal

Author definition lives once at the feed channel level, inside <byline:contributors>, and individual <item>s reference it by id. The four pieces Henshaw highlights:

• Author definition. A <byline:person id="…"> with name, URL, avatar, profile links (Mastodon, GitHub, etc.), plus IndieWeb-style now and uses links.
• Context. A <byline:context> element — a one-sentence bio, capped at 280 characters, framed as "who you are, what you do, what readers can expect."
• Perspective. Per-item <byline:perspective> tag — personal, review, and (per bylinespec.org) news, satire, official, sponsored. Tells the reader app what kind of post this is.
• Theme. Author-specified color, accent, and style ("light"/"dark") for subtle visual customisation in the reader (author card borders, accent strips).

Sample shape from the article:

<byline:contributors>
  <byline:person id="annie">
    <byline:name>Annie Park</byline:name>
    <byline:context>Designer and photographer based in Portland. Previously design lead at Figma. I write about creative tools, process, and the indie web.</byline:context>
    <byline:url>https://annie.example.com</byline:url>
    <byline:avatar>https://annie.example.com/avatar.jpg</byline:avatar>
    <byline:profile href="https://mastodon.social/@annie" rel="mastodon"/>
    <byline:profile href="https://github.com/anniepark" rel="github"/>
    <byline:now>https://annie.example.com/now</byline:now>
    <byline:uses>https://annie.example.com/uses</byline:uses>
    <byline:theme color="#4A90A4" accent="#FF6B6B" style="light"/>
  </byline:person>
</byline:contributors>

Why this exists

The framing on bylinespec.org calls it "the context problem." A modern RSS reader pulls in personal blogs, corporate press releases, journalism, satire, sponsored posts — they all render with the same shape, and the reader has to remember from memory who someone is and what kind of post this is. Existing RSS already has <author> and Atom has <atom:author> with name/email/uri, but neither carries enough to render an author card or tell apart an opinion piece from a news report.

Byline's bet is that the way to fix that is the same way RSS solved everything else: a new namespace, progressively layered on, optional everywhere. Feeds without it keep working. Readers without it keep working.

Status

The spec is under consideration and is expected to be accepted and published for use before or by the end of this year.

Maintained on bylinespec.org, released under CC0 1.0. The site ships a validator and a generator. The publisher who'd most obviously benefit is the kind of multi-author personal-publishing surface that's grown back since the federated-fediverse turn — the same audience IndieWeb has been talking to for years.

What's interesting about the design choices

A few details worth flagging beyond Henshaw's summary:

• Decentralised identity, no registries. A <byline:person> is identified by its URL (or any URI). No "claim your byline ID" account anywhere. This is straight out of the IndieWeb playbook — your domain is your identity.
• <byline:profile rel="…"> reuses link relations rather than enumerating platforms. rel="mastodon", rel="github", etc. — extensible without touching the spec.
• <byline:now> and <byline:uses> are pointers to two long-running IndieWeb conventions (/now for what someone's doing currently, /uses for what they use). Embedding them in the feed pulls those into the reader without the reader having to know the conventions exist.
• Theme is author-side, not feed-reader-side. Visually, the author chooses the accent; the reader gets to decide whether to honour it. Mirrors how email clients negotiate sender colour hints.
• Perspective is a controlled vocabulary, not free-form tags. That's the load-bearing part if reader apps want to do anything with it (filter, group, render differently) — but the controlled list is also what the spec will get push-back on.

Connections

Byline is one of a small set of recent attempts to push the syndication stack forward without abandoning RSS — adjacent in spirit to JSON Feed (2017), the IndieWeb Microformats stack, and the long-tail of <podcast:*> extensions for podcasts. The differentiator here is that it's coming from a reader-app developer, not a publishing-side proposal — Godier wants better data to render in his reader, then pulls the spec along behind it.

In the broader thread of the vault, this is in the same lineage as filesystem-is-graph-database (small-scale data formats grow when adjacent tools start needing them) and digital-garden (personal publishing patterns getting first-class tooling).

Sources

• Article: coywolf-byline-rss — Jon Henshaw on Coywolf
• Spec: bylinespec.org (Terry Godier, CC0)