Post 2: What is RSS?

According to Wikipedia.com, "RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts." RSS is basically a way of a program to present new information on different news feeds, emails, and blogs to name a few and present it to the user at constantly updated feeds(headlines). An example would be you checking your email for new messages or signing into Livejournal and checking your friends' posts to see who has updated their Livejournal."Programs known as feed readers or aggregators can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that they find." --Wikipedia. Basically, a computer can take different information that is constanly being updated such as news articles and post them on your homepage for example.

RSS has evolved greatly over the years as different companies have tried to develop it. Netscape was the original creator but it was turned down as it was too complicated, and Netscape shortly afterwards lost interest. Other companies continued to work on the project to further develop it. The setback of this is there is no clear one to use and as different companies continue to develop different programs and evolve them some users such as programs as stated by Mark Pilgrim from XML.com has to use seven. For an example of what RSS programming looks like click on the link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
If you would like to learn further about sample files click on this link: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#sampleFiles


Personally, I wouldn't want to program RSS myself but it is something we use unconsciously at times to the point of being taken for granted and is in constant use via surfing the internet. Most things you do on the internet whether it be checking your email, reading the headlines, opening your homepage, or updating your blog all use RSS. Like it or not, everyone uses it that uses the internet.

Helpful Websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#sampleFiles