What Is RSS
What is RSS
RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it’s not just for news. Pretty much anything that 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 programs 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 favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.
There are serveral versions of RSS :
RSS 0.90 RSS 0.91 RSS 0.92
RSS 0.93 RSS 0.94 RSS 1.00
RSS 2.00
So which one do I use?
| Version | Owner | Pros | Status | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.90 | Netscape | Obsoleted by 1.0 | Don’t use | |
| 0.91 | UserLand | Drop dead simple | Officially obsoleted by 2.0, but still quite popular | Use for basic syndication. Easy migration path to 2.0 if you need more flexibility |
| 0.92, 0.93, 0.94 | UserLand | Allows richer metadata than 0.91 | Obsoleted by 2.0 | Use 2.0 instead |
| 1.0 | RSS-DEV Working Group | RDF-based, extensibility via modules, not controlled by a single vendor | Stable core, active module development | Use for RDF-based applications or if you need advanced RDF-specific modules |
| 2.0 | UserLand | Extensibility via modules, easy migration path from 0.9x branch | Stable core, active module development | Use for general-purpose, metadata-rich syndication |
