RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs etc. RSS is an acronym for: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, Real-time Simple Syndication etc etc.
Since 2000, use of RSS has spread to many of the major news organizations, including Reuters, BBC, PR Newswire, and CNN. RSS feeds are also widely used by the blog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text. These providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds under various usage agreements.
RSS is now used for many purposes, including marketing, bug-reports, or any other activity involving periodic updates or publications. Many corporations are turning to RSS for delivery of their news, replacing email and fax distribution.
A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. Some websites let people choose between RSS or Atom formatted web feeds; others offer only RSS or only Atom.
Technically speaking, a feed is just a file on a website, e.g. "http://www.site.com/rss.xml".
Every feed contains general feed information (feed title, short description etc.) and one or more items. Each item can be thought of as a separate news article or announcement. An item may represent a "story" -- much like a story in a newspaper or magazine; if so its description is a synopsis of the story, and the link points to the full story. An item may also be complete in itself.
An RSS-feed file is an XML file, describing the entities mentioned above.
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