RSS = Really Simple Syndication

Saturday, February 05, 2005

RSS is a group of computer languages designed to provide information about updated web content. RSS data, commonly known as a "feed", can be used for content distribution directly to end users & also for syndication: republishing content, or hyper-linked Headlines to it, on other sites

Originally developed by Dan Libby at Netscape in 1999 (first as RDF Site Summary with RSS 0.90, then as Rich Site Summary with 0.91), RSS has been further revised by the open RSS-DEV group with RSS 1.0. It's also been independently reworked by Dave Winer leading to RSS 2.0 (not an update of RSS-DEV's 1.0, but developed directly from Netscape's 0.91), which has popularized the term "Really Simple Syndication"

Apart from the different versions of RSS, there is another widely-used format for publishing feeds, called Atom... The Atom format was inspired by & offered as a solution to the various incompatable versions of RSS. Originally proposed by Sam Ruby, the principles behind the Atom project quickly gained a lot of support. Atom 0.3, released in December 2003, was implemented on several Google services, including Google News & Blogger

With the continued rapid growth of blogging, awareness of the benefits of providing a feed has lead to RSS feeds now being offered by major News sites & many other websites with regularly updated content are starting to provide subscription to updates & syndication of content via feeds

For the end user wanting the latest content from their favourite sites, feeds can be viewed via a News Reader / Aggregator - which could be a desktop application (example: FeedReader) or an online service (example: Bloglines). Most Readers support both the popular RSS & Atom feed formats

You can keep up-to-date with all the latest posts published on this blog via our Atom XML feed, published at: http://webmaster-central.blogspot.com/atom.xml

LINK TO THIS POST: RSS = Really Simple Syndication BOOKMARK THIS POST

Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home