What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology allowing content providers (bloggers and web publishers) to alert their consumers of new posts on their sites and to allow other sites to publish some of its content.
Not everyone agrees precisely what RSS stands for, but ¡°Really Simple Syndication¡± is a popular choice.
What are the advantages of RSS?
In general it means time savings because, thanks to RSS, you stay ahead of what¡¯s new without having to
browse every site you normaly visit. An RSS reader aggregates the content for you to view in one place, this saves time and brings you the content like when you're reading a newspaper with the advantage to view only headlines. You're in control of which articles you want to read.
RSS enabled sites
RSS-enabled sites provide RSS feeds that list article headlines, summaries and links back to the latest full-text articles on the web.
The following type of sites are typically now RSS-enabled;
- News services
- Databases
- many web logs (commonly called "blogs")
What does RSS look like?
Here's a sample RSS 1.0 feed
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
>
<channel rdf:about="http://www.xml.com/cs/xml/query/q/19">
<title>XML.com</title>
<link>http://www.xml.com/</link>
<description>XML.com features a rich mix of information
and services for the XML community.</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<items>
<rdf:Seq>
<rdf:li rdf:resource="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/normalizing.html"/>
<rdf:li rdf:resource="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/som.html"/>
<rdf:li rdf:resource="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/svg.html"/>
</rdf:Seq>
</items>
</channel>
<item rdf:about="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/normalizing.html">
<title>Normalizing XML, Part 2</title>
<link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/normalizing.html</link>
<description>In this second and final look at applying
relational normalization techniques to W3C XML Schema data modeling, Will Provost
discusses when not to normalize, the scope of uniqueness and the fourth and fifth
normal forms.</description>
<dc:creator>Will Provost</dc:creator>
<dc:date>2002-12-04</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/som.html">
<title>The .NET Schema Object Model</title>
<link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/som.html</link>
<description>Priya Lakshminarayanan describes in detail
the use of the .NET Schema Object Model for programmatic manipulation of W3C
XML Schemas.</description>
<dc:creator>Priya Lakshminarayanan</dc:creator>
<dc:date>2002-12-04</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/svg.html">
<title>SVG's Past and Promising Future</title>
<link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/svg.html</link>
<description>In this month's SVG column, Antoine Quint
looks back at SVG's journey through 2002 and looks forward to 2003.</description>
<dc:creator>Antoine Quint</dc:creator>
<dc:date>2002-12-04</dc:date>
</item>
</rdf:RDF>
Related resources
