Introduction
If you observe well, you will see that most of the sites has a icon small, usually orange, often accompanied by sayings such as “RSS”, “XML” or “Atom”, similar to those that are shown below. These icons are, in fact, a universal symbol used to indicate that, at that site, it is possible to use RSS feeds.
Thanks to this feature, websites, and blogs can spread content new quickly and accurately. To the user, the advantage is in order to be informed of every novelty of your favorite web sites. The goalthis article is to show how the RSS allows for such a possibility, explain as this pattern emerged and explain its basic operation.
What is RSS?
The acronym RSS has more than one meaning. Some define it as RDF Site Summary, others are called Really Simple Syndication. There are still those who understand as Rich Site Summary.
RSS is a standard developed in the XML language that allows those responsible for web sites and blogs to disseminate news or news of these. For this, the link and the summary of that news (or the news in full) is stored in a file extension .xml, .rss, or .rdf (it is possible to use other extensions). This file is known as feed or RSS feed.
A person interested in get the news or the news of a site should include the link to the feed on this in a program or service player RSS (also called aggregator). This software (or service, if it is a site) has the function to read the contents of the feeds that indexes and show it in your interface.
For you to understand it better, imagine the following situation: Arthur Dent is a person who likes to read the news/news several sites, among them: AbbreviationFinder, Long live the Linux, BR-Linux , and SheetOnline.
The problem is that, for being a person very busy, Arthur does not have much time to check every address in the search content new. For this to be possible, it uses the services of RSS of each of these sites. By the middle of your program-player, he clicks on the name of the site to be indexed and a list of news for that the address appears in a window to the side. This list may show only the title of the news (this title is also a link to the matter), or you can display all the contents, everything depends on the form of the work of the aggregator, and how the feed is made available.
It is important to note that there are several RSS readers available for free on the Internet. There are versions for virtually all operating systems. Each one is gifted the different resources. For example, there are programs that can add the e-mail clients and allow you to read news in software such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, for example. Others are able to verify the sites listed in a range of time set by you and emit a warning sound or visual warning as well that are a new news.
Much more used, however, are the readers online, with great the highlight for the Google Reader.The advantage of services like this is that you can access the feeds that you subscribe to from any computer with access to the the Internet, independent of the operating system.
As the RSS emerged?
The RSS standard has emerged in the beginning of 1999 and is a creation the team of Netscape, that “dropped” the project later why not find it viable. A company of smaller scale the UserLand, has decided to continue to the RSS feed to apply it in their blogging tools. For this, the developers decided to simplify the code, and, when this task was complete, RSS 0.91 was released. The Netscape had conducted its work until version 0.90.
In parallel to the work of UserLand, a group of developers continued the RSS 0.90 based on the standard RDF (see the following topic). Soon, the version 1.0 was released by this group. The UserLand, however, it continued its work, released versions as 0.92 and 0.93 until it finally reached version 2.0. Certainly, the UserLand would give the numbering to 1.0 of the latter, but this sequence had already been adopted by another group.
In fact, there are more groups working with RSS. This is why there are so many names for this technology.
What is RDF?
RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. It is a specification based on XML that has as its goal to automate and expand resources to the Internet through representation of information. The RDF has based on the work of a number of groups developing technologies information. This means that the RDF was not created exclusively for RSS feeds, as many think. In fact, if we study the RDF to the bottom, you will see that it has utility in various applications, such as in the search systems and mechanisms for sharing information.
What is Atom?
Unlike RSS, Atom is not an acronym, but also it is a format for the dissemination of news. There are those who say that this project was, initially, a proposal unified of the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. The Atom also it is XML-based, but its development is regarded as more sophisticated. The group that it works has the up to the support of the large corporations, such as Google.
How the RSS works?
By being XML-based, there is nothing better than to explain the functioning of the RSS through its “source code”. To serve as an example, we will use the code shown below.
The first line tells the version of the RSS. In this case, it is the 2.0. Already the tag (tag is a field in the HTML that must be filled out of the form <tagname> content </tagname>) channel indicates the channel of the feed. The tag link has the address of the site (https://www.abbreviationfinder.org) and the tag title is filled in the name of the site (AbbreviationFinder). In the description, it is possible to provide a brief description of the site. However, there are those who prefer to inform the slogan of the web site in this field.
The tag language tells the language used on the site (Portuguese-Brazil), and the field webmasterindicates the responsible for it. It is a good practice enter a email address in this tag.
Now comes the most interesting part: the area of the item. Within it is the news itself. For each note, it is necessary to have a area item specific. Notice that in the example there are two areas item, logo, there are two news items in this feed. The area item is populated with the tag title, that provides the title of the news; with the tag pubDate, that provides the date of publication; with the tag description, that allows to view a summary of the text (or full text); with the tag link, which indicates the original address of the news; with the tag the author, who tells who is the author of the text; and with the tag category, that tells you, if that is the case, in which section/category of site is that note. In the example, a piece of news belongs to the section Hardware , and the other to section Tips of the AbbreviationFinder.
Saving this code with the extension .rss, or .xml, and indicating to the aggregator, the address where the file will be available, the RSS feed of the site is ready. The job now is software or the service that reads the RSS that will need to use each the information in the proper manner.
You can manually edit your RSS or then use a program/script to own it. The code example has been generated in the program RSS Builder. Notice that esye name is entered in the tag generator, the first after the opening of the tag channel. There are many generators RSS on the Internet, just search for them on download sites. Some content managers such as WordPress, generate feeds automatically.
The universal symbol
From version 1.5, the Internet browser Mozilla Firefox started to adopt a different symbol for the RSS. After that, the symbol became a standard for representing RSS feeds, this it is become universal.
Ending
A simple idea and efficient. This is a good way of define the RSS standard represents. As you must have noticed, this is a very useful resource to access content specific in the middle of the tangle of information that the Internet has become. Through a single interface, you you can see news or know of news from various sources and read only the content that interest you.
We could not end without letting to inform you: you you can access the RSS feed the AbbreviationFinder to know the news of the site 🙂
