1 RSS

1.1 What is RSS?

RSS is a specially designed markup language for "news articles". With RSS, people can use RSS clients as dedicated news browsers.

1.2 Why not just use a webpage?

• RSS, being specialized, is faster.

• since the content is known to be news articles and not forms-based dynamic content, it isn't likely to change quite so often, and so downloading and not updating for a while is reasonable. Read: the semantics of Caching is simpler.

• no banner ads

• since it is mainly text, is more customizable - so seeing impaired can easily make the font larger. Granted, this can be done on a web browser, but often at the cost of destroying a page's layout. There is no layout with RSS - the content is there to be itself, not to fit into some pretty page.

1.3 Sites about RSS

• http://backend.userland.com/rss

• http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/

• http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/003576.php

All of the above sites have collections of links to other sites with tutorials, examples, more explanation, news, etc...

1.4 Varieties of RSS

There are a variety of RSS "flavors" - different versions. To convert from RSS 2.0 to RSS 1.0, here is a conversion script: https://sourceforge.net/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=101211