Really Simple Syndication

Syn­di­ca­tion has made a sig­nif­i­cant impact on how infor­ma­tion on the web is pro­duced and con­sumed. I read more arti­cles via RSS (Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion) feeds than from the source web pages. My feed reader is part of my daily routine.

The ele­ments in the RSS vocab­u­lary pro­vide meta­data about the con­tent, such as the title, the author, descrip­tion and orig­i­nat­ing site, in such a way that it can be shared through what is called an RSS feed. These feeds can be used to dis­play con­tent from one web site onto another, or be orga­nized and read through RSS-aware soft­ware called feed read­ers (or news readers).

The devel­op­ment of RSS is com­pli­cated polit­i­cal drama, and most instruc­tive on the dif­fi­cul­ties of devel­op­ing stan­dards. The result is that RSS devel­op­ers divided into two fac­tions : the RDF or RSS 1.0 group and the RSS 2.0 group. This fork has been well doc­u­mented from polit­i­cal, gen­er­al­ist, and insider per­spec­tives. While they con­flict with each other, later ver­sions of each fork are backward-compatible with ear­lier ver­sions (except for the non-conformant RDF syn­tax in 0.90), and both forks include prop­erly doc­u­mented exten­sion mech­a­nisms using XML Name­spaces. These issues spurred the devel­op­ment of a third new syn­di­ca­tion spec­i­fi­ca­tion, Atom in June 2003, which has also been accepted as a pro­posed standard.

For­tu­nately, most feed read­ers sup­port all branches.