Step-by-step primer on RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS is a protocol, an application of XML, that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content. Using RSS files, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from your Web site. Users can have constantly updated content from web sites delivered to them via a news aggregator, a piece of software specifically tailored to receive these types of feeds. RSS is the hottest thing in Web communication. It powers many popular applications such as weblogs, knowledge management networks, and news syndication.

Weblogging, a term coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997, is one of the most popular and fast growing applications of RSS. A blog is someone's personal dated 'log' frequently updated with new information about a particular subject or range of subjects.
[State of Utah Government Information Locator Service]

This is oriented toward weblogging, but it does a good job of explaining how to build an RSS feed.

11:04:42 AM    

XHTML Syndication Module.

Abstract

This document is meant to document the Syndication module for XHTML. This module defines a namespace and arttibutes that live in that namespace that allow an XHTML web page to be syndicated.

Motivation

The motivation for this document is to do away with RSS as a seperate file format. If web publishers and CMSs want to participate in content syndication then they have to produce two versions of their front page, the HTML version and the RSS version. A careful inspection of XHTML and common web practice shows that most of the information need to do syndication already exists in web pages published today. What is needed is a little extra information to make syndication possible.

[Joe Gregorio]

This is from July 2002. More to study. Not everyone likes RSS.

10:58:52 AM