Re: Can someone explain what's so great about RSS?

* Justin Patrin <papercrane@gmail.com>: > I've been seeing RSS gaining more and more popularity over the last > years and I simply do not understand why. Why is RSS so great? What > does it do that is so great and wonderful? The only thing it seems to > have over anything else is that it's using XMLwith a standardized > format. Other than that, RSS seems to me to be not any more useful > than, say, a daily e-mail with news (or whatever) from whatever you're > getting the RSS from. RSS is one-to-many communication, and is mainly used to indicate when content changes. Some of its characteristics: * Unlike newsletters, RSS can be completely anonymous -- one may subscribe to an RSS feed without providing any personal information (though RSS is flexible enough that it's possible to require this, should the site owner so desire). * Like NNTP, it's self-expiring -- an RSS feed only contains a set amount of entries at any given time, and pushes older ones off the list (typical counts are 10 items, but for high-volume sites like freshmeat.net, for instance, this may be 50 or 100). This also means that should you not check for a period of time -- several days or weeks -- you will not see old entries, only the newest ones. * Like a website, RSS is a pull (not push) technology. This means the site does not need to keep track of subscribers, which can be a boon when dealing with CAN-SPAM and other legislation. * RSS readers allow the user to categorize feeds much like mail, and to keep track of un/read feeds/entries. If you use Firefox, you can experience RSS via the LiveBookmarks system, or via a variety of plugins such as Sage. Thunderbird has RSS built-in in recent versions. There are also a variety of web-based ones. I'd say, try it out, see for yourself. -- Matthew Weier O'Phinney Zend Certified Engineer http://weierophinney.net/matthew/