RSS Protocol

RSS (protocol)

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a family of XML based communication standards with the following members:

• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.x)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0) (RDF: Resource Description Framework)

RSS can be understood as a web syndication protocol that is primarily used by news websites and weblogs. RSS allows a web developer to publish their website in a format that a computer program can easily understand and digest. This allows users to easily repackage the content on their own websites or blogs, or privately on their own computers.

RSS simply repackages a website as a list of data items, such as the date of a post, a description of the post and a link to it. A program known as an RSS aggregator or feed reader can then check RSS-enabled webpage for the user, and display any updated articles that it finds. This is more convenient than having the user repeatedly visit their favorite news websites, because it makes sure that the reader only sees material that they haven’t seen before. Web-based RSS aggregators are also available, sparing the user the inconvenience of downloading an application to their computer. Such readers can make a user’s feeds available on any computer with an Internet connection.

At the top level, a RSS document is a element, with a mandatory attribute called version, that specifies the version of RSS that the document conforms to. Subordinate to the element is a single element, which contains information about the channel (metadata) and its contents.