RSS - an Xml application

RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, it doesn't matter really.
What is important is that it is part of a revolution on the web known as Web 2.0 which can be thought of as the read/write web.
Anyone can now be a content producer, not just a consumer on the web.

Web 2.0 technologies include Blogging, Podcasting (examples of rss) and wikis.
To find out more look up these terms in wikipedia the wiki encyclopedia.

So what is RSS ?

"The RSS formats provide .... summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data.
This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.
RSS allows a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using a news aggregator.

... RSS allows you to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds, these are typically sites that change or add content regularly......
.... Unlike typical subscriptions to pulp-based newspapers, your RSS subscriptions are free.
Typically they give you a line or two of each article along with a link to the full article."
Quote from Wikipedia (another Web 2.0 technology).

Here is part of a typical RSS(xml) file

<item>
  <title>Earth Invaded</title>
  <link>http://news.example.com/2004/12/17/invasion</link>
  <description>The earth was attacked by an invasion fleet 
  from halfway across the galaxy; luckily, a fatal 
  miscalculation of scale resulted in the entire armada 
  being eaten by a small dog.</description>
</item>

As you can see it is an xml application which uses a few xml tags (item, title, link, description) to organise a news item.
A typical rss file would consist of a number of these news 'items'.

Software, known as 'Aggregators' is available to gather together these rss 'newsfeeds' from a large number of sources and deliver them to users on demand.

These xml/rss files can be read and rendered by a variety of devices, not just web browsers.

We can write applications that take advantage of these free 'feeds'.

Here is such an application that allows you to generate personalised newspaper that is updated daily on the topics that interest you.
I have used javascript and a bit of dom programming to turn a set of rss news feeds into an html page.

SCOOP

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