Habari Xenu - About RSS/Atom News Feeds

What are news feeds?
News feeds are a way of syndicating news and other information. Major news sites like BBC, New York Times, Washingon Post, Wired and news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, Metafilter, and personal weblogs publish summaries of their content in a standard format. When such a summary is published, it is easier for software (i.e., News Aggregators like Habari Xenu), search engines and even other websites to easily track changing content.

News feeds are not just for news. News feeds today carry news headlines, blogs, discussion forums, software announcements and much more. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete content items has the potential to be syndicated as a news feed.

What is RSS?
RSS is a standard for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. It is variously said to be an acronym of Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. RSS is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format.

It is the most popular format in which content is syndicated.

Versions of RSS
RSS 0.9 was introduced in 1999 by Netscape as a channel description framework / content-gathering mechanism for their My Netscape Network (MNN) portal. A by-product of this was the widespread adoption of XML-based lightweight syndication format like RSS by many.

RSS 0.91, re-dubbed "Rich Site Summary," was published in 2000 by Radio Userland's Dave Weiner. It expanded RSS and moved it away from its RDF roots. The standard was further extended into RSS 0.92 (December 2000) and RSS 0.94 (Aug 2002).

RSS 2.0 is a an effort to consolidate all the different variants and eliminate incompatibilities.

What is Atom?
"Atom is an XML-based file format intended to allow lists of information, known as "feeds", to be synchronised between publishers and consumers. Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as "entries", each with an extensible set of attached metadata. The primary use case that Atom addresses is for syndicating Web content such as Weblogs and news headlines to other Web sites and directly to consumers. However, nothing precludes it from being used for other purposes and types of content." (The Atom Syndication Format 0.3)