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The feeds as an XML application can be better stated as RSS and Atom, since these terms have been quite ubiquitous.

Feeds let us keep ourselves up to date with a particular site, and the technologies that let us do this are the feed formats RSS or Atom, both applications of XML. These feeds formats follow the XML specifications.

RSS as a syndication or feed format had its debut at around 2002. Atom, is actually a evolution of the format, and seems to have been incepted around mid-2003. As I mentioned earlier both these formats are based on the XML specifications. Then one would ask, what is the difference? Why do we need two formats?

RSS

RSS, the abbreviation, is used to refer any of the following standards:

• RDF Site Summary
• Rich Site Summary
• Really Simple Syndication

The above are the various different versions of RSS.

The first version, RDF Site Summary, was created by Ramanathan V Guha when he was working at Netscape for use at the Netscape portal. Later Dan Libby created the Rich Site Summary, the next versions of RSS. And later, around the end of 2002, RSS 2.0 or the Really Simple Syndication came into use, after a lot of fuss over the conformance and the validations that a RSS file had to undergo.

A RSS file is basically an XML file that gets generated or created as and when new content is updated to a site. The software or the Content Management System that updates the site with the new content also updates this file to include the links and summaries to it, and remove the older ones.

The website would always maintain an updated RSS file, and with all the visitors/readers of the site who have subscribed would know about it since their feed reader would fetch this latest RSS file for them. This saves the trouble for visitors/readers to constantly check their websites for updates. Once they come to know of the updates from their Feed Reader, they have the choice of visiting the website to further interact, and in some cases read the full content.

Atom

Atom seems to have been formulated to over come some of the difficulties that RSS formats had. There have been many flavors of RSS. One of the main feature of Atom, is that the data encoded in a entry can be defined to be a plain text, XHTML or other form of data. In RSS, there is no fool-proof way of knowing what is coming through. As a result of which, there is a possibility of different feed-readers would render or present the data of an entry differently.

XML not supposed to be our “savior” and free us from the specific system dependencies. We already had several different flavors of RSS in our basket of syndication format. Now, there is Atom thrown into the basket. The different flavors of RSS and Atom, seem to be taken backward.

May be, these are necessary steps to be taken in order to get that one standard format. It will be difficult with a lot many people working on these different formats. It will be difficult for them to come to a consensus. But that will be a necessary step too, else we will not be seeing any standard for feeds.