RSS,as the name suggests is a way to syndicate data for webservices.It is a group of feed formats used to publish works e.g. blogs news items,etc.It allows information to be published once and viewed in different programs.A user has to just subscribe to the feed,by visisting the feed's URI or the simplest aproach would be clicking on the RSS icon on their browser and voila!your subscription has been initiated,you donot have to visit the page often,fear missing the latest updates and stuff,just RSS.And yeah!Feeds can be read using feed-readers (such as feedburner or bloglines etc.) or an aggregator which can be a web/windows(desktop)/mobile based.So,it has something for everyone,the Publisher and the end user.
History:
If we trace the history a bit RSS started as RDF Site Summary(RSS) introduced by Ramanathan Guha for Netscape(RSS 0.9),later renamed as Rich Site Summary(RSS) and this incorporated Winer's scriptingNews syndication Format(RSS 0.9.1). Netscape gave up on this and later
a team called the RSS-Dev Group developed a newer version of RSS,without much changes. In the version released in 2000 Winer made an attempt to include audio file syndication on feeds,which I feel gave birth to podcasting.RSS 2.0 was released in the later part of 2002,RSS 2.0 removed the type attribute. RSS logo was initially used by Mozilla Firefox and later incorporated by other softwares and browsers and the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds.
Downfalls:
RSS does not allow any well-formed XML markup in it’s content. This is very bad when it comes to using RSS-syndicated content elsewhere. In fact, it only supports plain text or escaped HTML which, without getting into the technical issues surrounding that, simply means it’s very difficult to work with.
RSS Example:
--HTML tags cannot be included-------------
How is RSS different from ATOM?
I personally feel that both are same and work the same but for the fact that metadata is not that comprehensive in 2.0.Atom is a relatively recent spec and is much more robust and feature-rich than RSS. A feed consists of some metadata about the feed, followed by one (or naturally more) entries. The metadata chunk in ATOM contains, happily, all of the data we found missing from the default RSS 2.0 feeds. The id element provides the "where," giving the feed's URI. The title provides a "what," giving the title of the feed.Author says "who" created the feed, and link provides the "how"--giving a link to an HTML version of the resource the feed represents.And my favorite - Atom feeds provide an “updated” field which means that any feeds that are modified have a timestamp associated with them. And if we sample a section of an Atom feed,it can also contain elements detailing categories, intellectual property rights, contributors' details, a feed's logo, and more.All these are quite important from a publisher's perspective. A cool feature of Atom has to do with autodiscovery. Most of the time, if you point your browser to a feed-enabled website, autodiscovery kicks in and the browser alerts you in its own unique way to the presence of a feed. The same thing happens when you point a feed reader to a feed-enabled website as opposed to the specific feed itself. While feed autodiscovery has been around for a long time, Atom feeds actually contain a self pointer autodiscovery URL which is highly unique from RSS itself. RSS is not the be all and end all of blogging. It is certainly possible to blog without using RSS either to collect your content or to publish it to the masses. However, the sheer benefit in terms of traffic opportunity and exposure should be enough for any blogger to add a new dimension to his blog.·
Current Mood: calm ·
Current Music:Mad
No comments:
Post a Comment