An RSS is a system for allowing users to view information in the simplest possible format, it is a technology that allows specific reading software to download information (or “feeds”) from a website so a person can read it at their own leisure. It’s difficult to define what RSS stands for are there are many different opinions, through research the most popular 2 that I have found are Rich Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication.

RSS – A technology that allows web users to receive (ongoing, constantly updated) information collected from many sources through a simple reader. This is supplied through an “RSS feed” that users can subscribe to. - http://iws.cit.cornell.edu/iws2/technology/techinfo.cfm

The above source defines RSS as being ongoing and consistently updated meaning that information is constantly being downloaded to the software, and the website must be updated regularly. This means that there are many practical applications for this on the internet, but the most popular use would be for News websites, where information is updated many times every day and every time the program is used it downloads all of the feeds it hasn’t yet downloaded and sorts them via date.

RSS not only contains information based on the content of the site, but also information regarding how it was published for the software to read, this includes the date of publish, the title of the page and content, any images that are used, the language of the content and the website that the information is taken from. RSS is not just used for News, but many other websites such as popular shopping site Amazon integrate it with their sites to offer more features for their customers, such as keeping track of new items up for sale within a specific catagory or watching price changes on or even waiting for stock to change.

RSS is an application for the programming language XML (Extensible Markup Language), and it complies to the RDF standard which is:

A set of rules (a sort of language) for creating descriptions of information, especially information available on the World Wide Web. – http://www.unitedyellowpages.com/internet/terminology.html

The structure of RSS must comply to the standards of XML 1.0 when being used to be able to be recognised by the reading software that is downloading it. With using the XML structure, RSS works very similar to Markup languages like HTML, from http://www.codeproject.com/KB/tips/RSS.aspx you can see the basic structure of how RSS needs to be layed out using the XML structure:

<item>
    <title>My Articles</title>
    <link>www.MyCollection.com/articles</link>
    <description>list of Articles written by me.</description>
</item>

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/tips/RSS.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/rss-help.html

http://iws.cit.cornell.edu/iws2/technology/techinfo.cfm