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RSS FAQs - Introduction to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Basics

By: FYIcenter.com

Part:   1   2 

A collection of 7 FAQs on RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Clear answers are provided with tutorial samples on introduction to Website syndication technology; RSS and Atom syndication file standards and versions. Topics included in this collection are:

  1. What Is RSS (Really Simple Syndication)?
  2. How Many Versions of RSS Language Standards?
  3. What Is Atom?
  4. What Are the Main Differences between Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0?
  5. What Is the Icon for RSS and Atom?
  6. What RSS 2.0 Files Look Like?
  7. What Atom 1.0 Files Look Like?

What Is RSS (Really Simple Syndication)?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is technology that can be used on Websites to syndicate and distribute frequently updated content via news aggregators.

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.

RSS is also a special XML based language used to create RSS files on Websites that contains headlines or summaries of news, or site contents to allow news aggregators to fetch and redistribute.

What Is the Relation between RSS and XML?

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a generic markup language to organize generic information into a structured document with embedded tags.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an extension of XML designed to organize headlines of news or summaries of Web pages to feed to news aggregators.

For more information on XML, please visit http://www.w3.org/XML/.

How Many Versions of RSS Language Standards?

RSS is relatively new. Many versions have been developed in recent years:

  • RSS 0.90 - The earliest known version of RSS released to the public by Netscape in 1999. RSS 0.90 is based on RDF (Resource Description Framework). When RSS 0.90 was created, the RSS initialization stood for Rich Site Summary and not Really Simple Syndication.
  • RSS 0.91 - Developed by UserLand in 2000.
  • RSS 1.0 - Published as a proposal by a group led by Rael Dornfest at O'Reilly in 2000.
  • RSS 2.0 - Released through Harvard under a Creative Commons license in 2003.

For more information on RSS 2.0, please visit http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss.

What Is Atom?

Atom is an XML-based document format that describes lists of related information known as "feeds". Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as "entries", each with an extensible set of attached metadata. For example, each entry has a title.

The current version of Atom is Atom 1.0. For more information, please visit http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt.

What Are the Main Differences between Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0?

Main differences between Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0:

  • Atom has separate "summary" and "content" elements, while RSS only has one "description" element.
  • Atom standardizes auto-discovery in contrast to the many non-standard variants used with RSS 2.0.
  • In Atom, it is mandatory that each entry have a globally unique ID, which is important for reliable updating of entries.
  • Atom 1.0 allows standalone Atom Entry documents whereas with RSS 2.0 only full feed documents are supported.
  • Atom specifies that dates be in the format described in RFC 3339. The date format in RSS 2.0 was underspecified and has led to many different formats being used.

What Is the Icon for RSS and Atom?

The Web browser and Website syndication industry has adopted a standard icon to identify syndicated content as shown below:
            Syndication Feed Icon

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