What is RSS and how does it work?

[Eru]

I am developing a new social networking website as a part of my project. Many of my friends have suggest me to implement "RSS" in it. But I have no information about this technology. So, I need to know what is RSS and how does it work? Does the operating system has do to anything with it? I am using Windows Vista Home Premium operating system in my computer. Please reply soon with possible answers as I need to study about RSS and implement this technology in my website.

[johnson22]

It is very interesting to study about how RSS and how it works. Actually, RSS means Really Simple Syndication. This technology allows you to distribute some notices, headlines and many a times a large content to a large group. RSS is used by the programs in the computer that have to arrange headings and notices too, especially for simple reading. I suggest you to go with it and implement the technology in your website as it will be helpful to you only in the future.

[Techguru01]

I have used RSS and I know how it works. RSS helps the author of the website because of which he is able to maintain the website in a very good manner. RSS helps the author to maintain a notifications group. This group is called as an RSS Feed. The users who want to check for the topics of their interest and that too the latest news about them just have to search this group. Even the headlines of the latest news can be checked by using this method. I suppose that you will have got a rough idea about what RSS is and how it works.

[deveritt]

RSS and its working is implemented in many of the websites and it basically has 2 main components:

1. The server end
2. The client end

I will explain to you its working with a very simple example. The sever end generally contains a news website, a blog an IPTV show and so on. This end generally produces the RSS feed.
The client end usually contains a web browser, a web-based RSS aggregetor. This end generally consumes the RSS feed.

[Trio]

If you have learnt what RSS is and how it works then, there is one more important thing to know, that is "which format of RSS should you use". The formats are given below:

• Version: 0.90----Owner: Netscape----Not recommended
• Version: 0.91----Owner: UserLand----For basic syndication
• Version: 0.92, 0.93, 0.94----Owner: UserLand----Instead use 2.0
• Version: 1.0----Owner: RSS-DEV Working Group----For RDF-based applications
• Version: 2.0----Owner:UserLand----for general-purpose, metadata-rich syndication

[Techno01]

You need not have a special operating system as such for implementing RSS. This is because RSS is an XML application. If you have understood what RSS is and what work it does, then here is a simple code of RSS:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN"
"http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd">
<rss version="0.91">
As shown in the code, the documents of RSS begin with the declaration of XML 1.0 and after that the document type declaration.