What is RSS
RSS is basically a collection of web feeds that are used to display information about frequently updated websites such a news sites, blog pages etc. RSS or RDF Site Summary as it is formally known may contain an excerpt of the site or the entire site itself and keeps people updated upon the newest additions to various websites.
RSS is the first attempt at syndication which had been tried many times before since 1995. The first successful attempt was made by Ramanathan Guha a member of the RSS-DEV Working Group in 1999 for My.Netscape.Com portal who eventually created 1.0 version on his own and in 2002 Dave Winer who had earlier worked on a version forMy.Netscape.Com portal release the 2.0 version of RSS after which it began being known as Really Simple Syndication.
However since neither RSS-DEV Working Group nor Winer had Netscape involvement on their final creations they could make official claims on RSS.
Both branches of RSS have extension mechanisms that make it possible to track changes in the other branch which leads to the other branch soon developing the same feature. The major compatibility issue that both branches had is HTML markup. Both branches were not able to filter out HTML markup from feeds.
RSS feeds have proved quite convenient and have begun to be used quite often and have become very popular. Indeed even social networking sites like Orkut show feeds and latest updated sites.
For a person who is in the habit of browsing the internet for latest news and development this tool is the perfect thing. It saves the user the problem of going to each site to see whether it has been updated or not.
Though the RSS mechanism needs to evolve a bit more keeping in mind its incompatibility problems and shortcomings, it is still the best of its kind and keeps the average internet user quite happy.
Filed under: RSS
