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What is RSS?

Randy Harris

January 16, 2006 (17:23:40 EST)

RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary.

RSS is the premier encoding format for news headline syndication on the web.

Aside from news feeds, many other forms of text based content such as web-logs, ( or simply "blogs"),
and other frequently updated information like change logs can be organized for syndicated distribution.

An RSS feed is a text file formatted with the appropriate XML / RSS / RDF schema so that news article titles, abstracts, links to full text, author name, publication date, etc can easily be parsed from the text.

Once parsed, the information can be reformatted for display on a website as a series of headlines which are linked to the full text original article. By filtering or otherwise modifying the parsed RSS data, customized content can be presented to users.

How Does RSS Work?

RSS is a scheme of sorts... Technically, web publishers create files formatted according to the RDF / RSS / XML schema for news headline syndication.

These RDF files are an index of articles for distributution and contain publisher info along with a listing of article titles, URLs, abstracts, pub. dates, and related info.

Diagram showing flow of RSS / RDF / XML news feed, (c) 2004 RMH, all rights reserved.

In the diagram above, the green lines represent the path of articles and RDF/RSS files. These files are created by the publisher and uploaded onto their web server.

The red lines represent the path of RDF/RSS data files. Note, these files are transferred between the publisher's webserver(s), any news aggregator (if used), and the webserver where the news feed client website is hosted. End users should never see the DF/RSS data.

The blue lines represent the path of normal HTML links. Note the end user can access any article originating from any publisher, or via any news aggregator.

As the diagram shows, the inter-operability of RDF / RSS data and the underlying HTML technology not only make wide distribution easy, but also very efficient and economical in terms of data transmission. The end user reaches the article via paths established between the publisher and the news feed client website. The client website need only publish a small amount of data --- costs for server space and bandwidth for distribution of the news articles is paid by the publisher. In other words, running a news feed will not eat up your server bandwidth or download limits.

Below is an example of a RDF / RSS file from http://www.theserverside.com and some general information of the structure and elements of the RDF / RSS file.

Screen shot of RDF / RSS fedd from www.theserverside.com

The RDF file is structured in a way that the XML schema to use is encoded in the file, (ie- Dublin Code or "DC", RSS 1.0, 2.0, etc.). Knowing the version of RDF / RSS and where to obtain the associated XML schema, the feed can be easily parsed, (parsing is a programming technique
where, the text of the actual data in stripped of all data formatting codes and then analyzed and re-assembled as needed).

XML / RSS / RDF / W3C

RSS was previously known as RDF Site Summary, in which "RDF" stood for Resource Description Framework.
The Resource Description Framework was developed by the W3C organization.
W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium which develops interoperable technologies, (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) for the web.
The W3C was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web.
Today the W3C has about 400 global member organizations.

Want to know the nuts and bolts of RSS? Check the Dive into XML, article about RSS. It's just one of the interesting things you'll find at xml.com.

O'Reily & Associates has a nice article online, (they want to sell you a book, but they do have good books), this one is from Spidering Hacks about Running an RSS News Aggregator.