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thesmallest.com lessonettes: short essays on whatever |
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RSS Defined For the first and simplest formats RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, but the other main forms are short for Really Simple Sindication and the more complex-sounding RDF Site Summary. But, while the internal structures of the different formats vary, they all work in broadly similar and closely-related ways. If you dive straight into technical discussions of RSS construction you’ll find that it can be rather daunting, especially as there are multiple versions of the standard in active use and development. However, at the basic level it can all be summed up quite simply. An RSS reader program will list numerous different channels, each with articles listed as headline-style titles. A channel itself is simply a text file stored on a web server, very much like a traditional HTML file. RSS is, in a nutshell, simply a way of ‘marking up’ information, a way to define different parts of text as title, description, link, and so on, so that it can be listed in organised form in a special reader program. This is done with XML-based tags. If you’re at all familiar with basic HTML tags you’ll know how these work; they are simply identifiers which are inserted into the text to mark up different parts of the information. In the case of RSS, these are exclusively about pointing out to the reader program what a bit of data is rather than what it should look like. Your RSS reader always displays the words in the same format, wherever they come from; all the tagging does is help sort out what the different elements of data actually are. |
RSS defined |
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