RSS (protocol)
XML-based Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0)
RSS can be understood as a web syndication protocol that is primarily used by news websites and weblogs. RSS allows a web developer to publish content on their website in a format that a computer program can easily understand and digest. This allows users to easily repackage the content on their own websites or blogs, or privately on their own computers.
RSS simply repackages the content as a list of data items, such as the date of a news story, a summary of the story and a link to it. A program known as an RSS aggregator or feed reader can then check RSS-enabled webpages for the user, and display any updated articles that it finds. This is more convenient than having the user repeatedly visit their favorite news websites, because it makes sure that the reader only sees material that they haven't seen before. Web-based RSS aggregators are also available, offering the user an alternative to using dedicated software, and making the user's feeds available on any computer with Web access.
At the top level, a RSS document is a <rss> element, with a mandatory attribute called version, that specifies the version of RSS that the document conforms to. Subordinate to the <rss> element is a single <channel> element, which contains information about the channel (metadata) and its contents.
The status of RSS as of April 2004 is version 2.0.1.
See also: Atom (standard)
RSS clients
See news aggregator for a list of clients for various operating systems.
