How do RSS Feeds work?

How do RSS feeds work?

• Answer:

  They are very simple (in fact RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication :-p ). An RSS page is, at its core, just a specially constructed webpage. Instead of surrounding content with special tags directing the browser how to color and format the content, an RSS page has simple tags identifying to the RSS reader application that "this is the title, this is the author, this is the body and this is the time it was published." Each RSS reader is free to  display that information in whatever format it chooses. So, for example, here is the core of an item from NPR's headline's RSS feed (I stripped out some of the extra stuff):     <item>       <title>Moscow Bomber Identified As Rebel Widow, 17</title>       <description>Russian investigators identified one of the attackers as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova of Dagestan and said they were still trying to identify the second bomber and track down the organizers of Monday's attack, which killed 40. A leading newspaper said Abdurakhmanova's husband was an Islamist militant leader killed by government forces in December.</description>       <pubDate>Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:19:00 -0400</pubDate>       <link>http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125512931&amp&ft=1&amp&f=1001%3C%2Flink%3E     </item> The article being syndicated has a title, a description, a publication date, a link, and content. An RSS "feed" is a single webpage with tons of these items right after another. This is all published and served by a web server onto a specific page, in this case http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1001 . When you tell your RSS client to "subscribe" to that feed, all it is doing, at the end of the day, is downloading the file you point it to at regular intervals and displaying each <item> listed as an item in the RSS feed.