This article targets a non technical audience. Its purpose is to inform Internet users about syndication technologies so that they can make an informed decision on how to access data.
RSS 2.0 stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a relatively new technology that allows Internet users to subscribe to websites that have a frequently updated content in order to keep track of the changes.
Suppose you read 3 blogs and 2 news websites regularly. Prior to syndication technology, in order to know if any of these websites had new content, you had no other choice but to check these 5 locations manually. If there was new content, you were happy. If not, you had just wasted some time. Rinse and repeat… In other cases, there was perhaps new content, but nothing truly interesting to you. You would surf to the site and be disappointed one more time.
Enter syndication: your favorite websites now propose you a feed. A feed is a file in XML format that can be read by specialized software called news aggregators, and in other cases it can even be read by some browsers (Firefox, Opera…) or e-mail clients (Mozilla Thunderbird, for example). You, as an Internet reader, have the choice to subscribe to a feed, which marks your intention to receive news from a website. Your software of choice then digests the feed and shows you the last headlines presented at the website. In some cases, the headlines are accompanied by an excerpt of the article, whilst in other cases the article appears in its entirety. After reading part of the news item, you can then decide if you want to surf to the website in order to get complementary information, pictures, leave a comment, etc.
RSS provides an efficient way to keep informed of what you want, and lets you use your time more efficiently. What’s more: RSS feeds are served to you free of charge. The term subscription is used to hook a feed to your software, but the process is always painless free. That being said, along with the mentioned advantages, come some minor disadvantages that may well threaten the Web as we know it.
First, some web designers are somewhat worried that less people will drop by their website. Countless hours of design layout could be thrown away simply because people would read the same content on the RSS feed. This is not really a problem for the users, as the most important part of a website is definitely its content, not fancy graphics and layout. Think of it as glamour without make-up: it can still be a good-looking chick. Additionally, a way to circumvent this is to propose excerpts only, so that when people want to read the full story, they come over to the website.
Lastly, there exists some web applications that allow you to transform an RSS feed into HTML, so that the data can be displayed on a website once again. This may seem innocent, but could well turn to be a new form of content theft. One unscrupulous author could be collecting feeds with the sole purpose of displaying them on his or her website, hence transforming display of your good content into traffic and search engine ranking for his own benefit. This issue is quite new, and is still gathering some buzz.
I hope this post was interesting to you and that you learned enough to decide what technology suits yourself more. Last but not least, my RSS feed is https://graphility.com/hiddenson/feed. You may want to check it out and decide how you enjoy the Construct best.
Additional information: RSS Wikipedia entry
Happy reading!