RSS Feeds Filetype:RSS
From LoveToKnow Web-Design
If you want to use RSS feeds, filetype:RSS needs to become a familiar format in your web design toolkit. The development of RSS is an integral part of web 2.0, and worth learning about regardless of your level of expertise.
RSS: A New Content Delivery System
RSS originally stood for "RDF Site Summary" and was developed in 1999 by Ramanathan Guha at Netscape. Later versions were improved by Dan Libby with elements of Dave Winer's scriptingNews formats. Libby also renamed it "Rich Site Syndication."
Development continued by various groups including Dave Winer until 2000 when he released a major upgrade in RSS feeds. Filetype:RSS 2.0 was renamed "Really Simple Syndication" and it revolutionized the way content was delivered on the web.
What Does RSS Actually Do?
To really understand RSS, a magazine metaphor works well. When a publisher produces a magazine, it is content – and people get that content one of two ways: they either go to a newsstand and buy a copy, or they subscribe and get the magazine delivered to their house. In other words, it comes to them.
Really Simple Syndication provides the same service. In the web 1.0 world, if you wanted to find out what was happening on the web, you would have to go to the web page where the content was published – not terribly difficult, but you actually had to check and see if your favorite sites actually had new content online. There was no way to know about updates without checking yourself – like going to a newsstand to see if the latest issue of your favorite comic book had been released yet.
However, with RSS, when a blogger updates their site, a file with the extension .RSS is updated – this is commonly known as an "RSS feed." At the same time, people use "feed readers" (such as Google Reader or Newsgator) which are programs (or sites) that constantly monitor the RSS feeds from their favorite sites. This means anytime a new blog entry is posted, they can see it (and often read it) right there on that page. You can read hundreds or thousands of sites all on one reader, as opposed to having to check them out yourself.
The concept of RSS feeds also revolutionized the kind of content people could subscribe to – not only web sites, but images (from RSS-enabled sites such as Flickr), podcasts (iTunes uses its own form of RSS to enable podcast subscriptions) and even video (YouTube provides the ability for people to "subscribe" to the videos posted by popular users, such as the "Chad Vader" web series).
What Makes RSS Feeds Filetype:RSS?
Like any other web format, from HTML to XML, RSS formatted files require certain headers to let the browsers know that they are RSS. At its core, RSS is written in Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the first element required in an RSS feed is the declaration: <?xml version="1.0"?>. Next you need to declare that it is, in fact, an RSS file: <rss version="2.0">(and the file needs to end with a closing </rss> tag). After that, the code that follows is very dependent on the kind of data that is being syndicated. Blog entries would have things like headings, date stamps, authors and possibly summaries of content. Podcasts would include these things plus audio file types and program length. Videos would also include the format, episode number, etc. Since XML is eminently customizable, the content producer can include whatever they want in their RSS file.
That doesn't mean that it's not important to format the file correctly in order for feed readers to be able to parse the content. You can find out all the specifications and even take tutorials on it at the RSS Board website.
While this can be done by hand with nothing more than Notepad, as the files get longer it can become more and more unwieldy. For this reason, many content production applications and widgets automatically generate RSS feeds (filetype:RSS 2.0) on platforms such as Wordpress.
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