What is RSS? Tell me please…

12 Feb

Posted by admin as Blogging

RSS can actually be explained in three words, it may stand for Really Simple Syndication, but it’s actually doesn’t mean anything. It’s an acronym!

Depending on who you ask and what version of RSS you are speaking about, it may stand for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or a variation on one of those. But what its called doesn’t matter, you also don’t need to care about is the differentversions. There are 0.90 and 0.91 (created by Netscape), 1.0 (by RSS-DEV), and 0.9x and 2.0 (by UserLand Software) versions, but almost all applications that handle RSS feeds can read all the different versions. There’s also a similar format called Atom, explained below.

RSS is a text-based format, a type of XML, it’s nice to know this only because often RSS files are often labeled as XML. RSS version 1.0 is also RDF (whatever), which, again, is interesting only because an RSS file may be labeled as RDF. RSS files (which are also called RSS feeds or channels) simply contain a list of items. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL (e.g. a web page). Other information, such as the date, creator’s name, etc., may also be available depending on the source of the feed. The most common use for RSS files is for news and other reverse-chronologically ordered websites like blogs. For example, this site is a blog, which is also available in RSS format. An item’s description may contain all of a news article, blog post, etc., or just an extract or summary. The item’s link will usually point to the full content located at the article source site (although it may also point to what the content itself links to).

When a website has an RSS feed, it is said to be “syndicated.” There are various other syndication formats besides RSS (such as Atom), but RSS is by far the most widely used and supported today. RSS files do not have a common file extension, although they frequently end in one of .xml, .rss, or .rdf (note that other extensions may be used also). The term “scraping” refers to creating an RSS feed for a website that doesn’t provide one itself (i.e. scraping the text off of the page). That is, scraped feeds are not created by the same people who created the content within the feed. The issue with scraped RSS feeds may stop working if the page changes its layout.

What is Atom and why am I talking about it here?

Atom is a format quite similar to RSS. It was created by people who felt that RSS could be enhanced, and some that disagreed with some of the politics regarding RSS. Like anything that is generated by a committee, lots of different arguments surface over time about which format is better.

There are pros and cons to the format, but that’s more complex than I am going to deal with here. The basic difference is that while Atom is somewhat more complex (for producers of Atom feeds), it is also able to carry more composite information, and it is consistent across the syndication, storage, and editing of information. Just about everything on this page which discusses RSS applies equally well to Atom. You can learn more about Atom at the official website, AtomEnabled.org.