Web feed

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On the World Wide Web, a web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it by adding the feed resource address to a news aggregator client (also called a feed reader or a news reader). Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser or by dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator, thus "RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer." ^[1]

Contents

• Technical definition
• History
• Comparison to email subscriptions
• See also
• References
• External links

The kinds of content delivered by a web feed are typically HTML (webpage content) or links to webpages and other kinds of digital media. Often when websites provide web feeds to notify users of content updates, they only include summaries in the web feed rather than the full content itself. Many news websites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters operate web feeds. As web feeds are designed to be machine-readable rather than human-readable they can also be used to automatically transfer information from one website to another without any human intervention.

Technical definition

A web feed is a document (often XML-based) whose discrete content items include web links to the source of the content. News websites and blogs are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to search results.

Common web feed formats are:

• Atom
• JSON Feed
• RSS

Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999, ^[2] the RSS icon (" ") first gained widespread use between 2005 and 2006. ^[3] The feed icon indicates that a web feed is available. The original icon was created by Stephen Horlander, a designer at Mozilla. With the prevalence of JSON in Web APIs, a further format, JSON Feed, was defined in 2017.

History

Dave Winer published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website, covering how it was being used in his company's products, and claimed copyright to the document. ^[4] A few months later, UserLand filed a U.S. trademark registration for RSS, but failed to respond to a USPTO trademark examiner's request and the request was rejected in December 2001. ^[5]

The RSS-DEV Working Group, a project whose members included Guha and representatives of O'Reilly Media and Moreover, produced RSS 1.0 in December 2000. ^[6] This new version, which reclaimed the name RDF Site Summary from RSS 0.9, reintroduced support for RDF and added XML namespaces support, adopting elements from standard metadata vocabularies such as Dublin Core.

In December 2000, Winer released RSS 0.92 ^[7] a minor set of changes aside from the introduction of the enclosure element, which permitted audio files to be carried in RSS feeds and helped spark podcasting. He also released drafts of RSS 0.93 and RSS 0.94 that were subsequently withdrawn. ^[8]

In September 2002, Winer released a major new version of the format, RSS 2.0, that redubbed its initials Really Simple Syndication. RSS 2.0 removed the type attribute added in the RSS 0.94 draft and added support for namespaces.

Because neither Winer nor the RSS-DEV Working Group had Netscape's involvement, they could not make an official claim on the RSS name or format. This has fueled ongoing controversy in the syndication development community as to which entity was the proper publisher of RSS.

One product of that contentious debate was the creation of an alternative syndication format, Atom, that began in June 2003. ^[9] The Atom syndication format, whose creation was in part motivated by a desire to get a clean start free of the issues surrounding RSS, has been adopted as RFC   4287.

In July 2003, Winer and UserLand Software assigned the copyright of the RSS 2.0 specification to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he had just begun a term as a visiting fellow. ^[10] At the same time, Winer launched the RSS Advisory Board with Brent Simmons and Jon Udell, a group whose purpose was to maintain and publish the specification and answer questions about the format. ^[11]

In December 2005, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team ^[3] and Outlook team ^[12] announced on their blogs that they were adopting the feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser , created by Stephen Horlander, a Mozilla Designer. A few months later, Opera Software followed suit. This effectively made the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, replacing the large variety of icons and text that had been used previously to identify syndication data.

In January 2006, Rogers Cadenhead relaunched the RSS Advisory Board without Dave Winer's participation, with a stated desire to continue the development of the RSS format and resolve ambiguities. In June 2007, the board revised their version of the specification to confirm that namespaces may extend core elements with namespace attributes, as Microsoft has done in Internet Explorer 7. According to their view, a difference of interpretation left publishers unsure of whether this was permitted or forbidden.

Comparison to email subscriptions

Web feeds have some advantages compared to receiving frequently published content via an email:

• Users do not disclose their email address when subscribing to a feed and so are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email: spam, viruses, phishing, and identity theft.
• Users do not have to send an unsubscribe request to stop receiving news. They simply remove the feed from their aggregator.
• The feed items are automatically sorted in that each feed URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box where messages must be sorted by user-defined rules and pattern matching).

See also

See Wikipedia:Syndication on how various aspects of Wikipedia can be monitored with RSS or Atom feeds.

• Web syndication
• feed: URI scheme
• Share icon

Related Research Articles

Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting. He is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext, Userland Software and Small Picture Inc., a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, with Turtle currently being the most widely used notation.

UserLand Software is a US-based software company, founded in 1988, that sells web content management, as well as blogging software packages and services.

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.

Web syndication is making content available from one website to other sites. Most commonly, websites are made available to provide either summaries or full renditions of a website's recently added content. The term may also describe other kinds of content licensing for reuse.

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

OPML is an XML format for outlines. Originally developed by UserLand Software as a native file format for the outliner application in its Radio UserLand product, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of web feeds between web feed aggregators.

Netscape Browser is the eighth major release of the Netscape series of web browsers, now all discontinued. It was published by AOL, but developed by Mercurial Communications, and originally released for Windows on May 19, 2005.

Channel Definition Format (CDF) was an XML file format formerly used in conjunction with Microsoft's Active Channel, Active Desktop and Smart Offline Favorites technologies. The format was designed to "offer frequently updated collections of information, or channels, from any web server for automatic delivery to compatible receiver programs." Active Channel allowed users to subscribe to channels and have scheduled updates delivered to their desktop. Smart Offline Favorites, like channels, enabled users to view webpages from the cache.

OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow the publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. Introduced in 2005, it is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard and accessible format.

Microformats (μF) are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data. They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary.

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.

FeedSync for Atom and RSS, previously Simple Sharing Extensions, are extensions to RSS and Atom feed formats designed to enable the bi-directional synchronization of information by using a variety of data sources. Initially developed by Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, it is now maintained by Jack Ozzie, George Moromisato, Matt Augustine, Paresh Suthar and Steven Lees. Dave Winer, the designer of the UserLand Software RSS specification variants, has given input for the specifications.

GeoRSS is a specification for encoding location as part of a Web feed. (Web feeds are used to describe feeds of content, such as news articles, Audio blogs, video blogs and text blog entries. These web feeds are rendered by programs such as aggregators and web browsers.) The name "GeoRSS" is derived from RSS, the most known Web feed and syndication format.

Web syndication technologies were preceded by metadata standards such as the Meta Content Framework (MCF) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), as well as by 'push' specifications such as Channel Definition Format (CDF). Early web syndication standards included Information and Content Exchange (ICE) and RSS. More recent specifications include Atom and GData.

Data feed is a mechanism for users to receive updated data from data sources. It is commonly used by real-time applications in point-to-point settings as well as on the World Wide Web. The latter is also called web feed. News feed is a popular form of web feed. RSS feed makes dissemination of blogs easy. Product feeds play increasingly important role in e-commerce and internet marketing, as well as news distribution, financial markets, and cybersecurity. Data feeds usually require structured data that include different labelled fields, such as "title" or "product".

The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) for the Internet, computing, and computer science, is a specification that defines a set of XML metadata vocabularies for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing content.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Feed icons .

• Pilgrim, Mark (December 18, 2002). "What is RSS?".
• Shea, Dave (May 19, 2004). "What is RSS/XML/Atom/Syndication?". Archived from the original on November 2, 2010. Retrieved February 16, 2006.