RSS Feed information

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. Actually it is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. It’s not only for news but pretty much anything can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the “recent changes” page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way. Rss-aware program called news “aggregators” are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favourite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

The initials “RSS” are variously used to refer to the following standards:
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification of data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an “RSS feed”, “webfeed”, “RSS stream”, or “RSS channel”.

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. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. Some websites let people choose between RSS or Atom formatted web feeds; others will provide only one of the two.