Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

How it works

To understand how RSS works, consider this possible scenario. Say you have a favorite news site that is updated frequently throughout the day and you want to make sure you don’t miss their Oscar nomination announcement. You could use your web browser to visit the site every 20 minutes and scan through it for new posts, but that would waste a lot of time. But, if that site is RSS-enabled (and most news sites are), every time they post an article to the site, a listing of that article simultaneously appears in RSS feed readers that have subscribed to the site and are themselves checking the site once an hour or so. Using a news reader, you could keep an eye on new articles as they are posted and take a break only when you see Oscar in the title.

Originally developed to create web “channels” during the days of web push technologies, news sites were the first to put RSS to widespread use. But it wasn’t until the weblog (or blog) phenomenon that the RSS acronym became as familiar as HTML.

Because blog creation software such as Blogger and Movable Type made it easy to publish content as an RSS feed, most bloggers make their site content available both on a web page and via an RSS feed (watch for the ubiquitous orange RSS or XML icon). That means that you can use a news reader to see when your friends post without having to check every blog, every day. Furthermore, you can often read the content right there in the reader, without skipping from site to site.

Many web users have ...