RSS and Atom Feed:
Feed is a data format which is used to provide frequently updated content to web users.
Would you like to keep yourself updated with the latest content from your favorite website or blog?
By
subscribing Feed, you can receive automatic updates from your favorite
website. For this Atom and RSS Feeds are used. RSS (Rich Site Summary)
is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Atom is same
like RSS. If you subscribed to your favorite website Feed, then they
fetch updated content from your favorite sites in such a format which
you can easily read in a Feed reader.
Atom and RSS are both a similar technology which was developed to help
people to receive automatic updates of their favorite websites.
Lets have a look in a more easiest way to understand about website Feed.
It
is one type of bookmarking. Before Feed, Internet or web users had to
bookmark their favorite sites. To check any update, user need to visit
bookmarked site. This creates more work for you as the reader. For
update, every time you need to visit bookmarked site. So if you forget
to check bookmarked site, then you could miss new content. Also, it is
more complicated to keep track of many bookmarked sites at the same
time.
So
by subscribing RSS or Atom Feed, you are asking the website to send you
new content, instead of having to fetch this yourself. It is somewhat
like getting a magazine subscription. Difference between Feed and
magazine subscription is: magazine is sent for defined time, such as
once in a month or once in 15 days etc.., but in Feed, new website
content is sent each time the site is updated. This could be daily or
regularly.
How can you get updated content by subscribing FEED?
You
will need a Feed Reader. Feed Reader is able to read Atom and RSS feeds
from websites. Because in their source or native forms, Atom and RSS
feeds are difficult to read, as they are in XML (Extensible Markup Language)
format. XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for
encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and
machine-readable. It looks like HTML. Feed readers translate this into
something which you can easily read. I will looks like a webpage.