What Is RSS (Rich Site Summary)?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a type of Web syndication or feed in XML format which allows users to access updates of a Website in a standardized format.

RSS originally called RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary. RSS is also called Rich Site Summary.

You can use RSS to create RSS feeds on your Websites that contains headlines or summaries of news, or site contents to allow users to fetch and redistribute.

Syndication benefits both users and publishers by helping users consume more information instead of visiting multiple web sites to see what's new, users can scan headlines or article summaries and click to read the full text. Some publishers also make their entire content (whether full-text or audio/video) available for users to access via RSS and view in other applications. It's "really simple" for publishers to make content available in this format.

Here is a short sample of an Atom XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
   <channel>
      <title>RSS Title</title>
      <description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description>
      <link>http://www.example.com/main.html</link>
      <lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:01:00 +0000 </lastBuildDate>
      <pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <ttl>1800</ttl>
      <item>
         <title>Example entry</title>
         <description>Here is some text containing an interesting description.</description>
         <link>http://www.example.com/blog/post/1</link>
         <guid isPermaLink="false">7bd204c6-1655-4c27-aeee-53f933c5395f</guid>
         <pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
   </channel>
</rss>

For more information on RSS, see RSS Website.

⇒Introduction of RSS

⇒⇒RSS FAQ and Tutorials