Weaving the Web of News (2/5) - exploring XML

Weaving the Web of News

Rich Site Summary (RSS)

Netscape invented RSS in order to advertise news channels for their Web service My Netscape Network, one of the first personalized portals. Any site could write up a summary file in RSS, submit the URL to My Netscape Network and enable users to construct their personal start page on that service from any of these registered news sources. The same example from above in RSS:

<?xml version="1.0"?>  
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
xmlns="https://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/"> 
<channel> 
<title>eXploringXML Channel</title> 
<link>https://www.exploringxml.com</link> 
<description>This is a channel about eXploringXML at WebReference: 
Free tutorials, examples, and tools for XML</description> 
</channel> 
<image> 
  <title>eXploringXML</title> 
  <url>https://www.webref.com/xml/art/logo.gif</url> 
  <link>https://www.exploringxml.com</link> 
</image> 
<item>
  <title>The Browser War cont'd: XML support in IE and Mozilla</title>
  <link>https://www.webref.com/xml/column4/</link>
</item>
<item>
  <title>XML Resources: Books and Software</title>
  <link>https://www.webref.com/xml/resources/</link>
</item>
</rdf:RDF>

My Netscape Network uses RSS extensively at my.netscape.com. My.userland.com is another point of registration for news syndication on the Web.

scriptingNews

One of the first syndication formats on the Web, scriptingNews was a bit more expressive than RSS, and of course slightly different in the meaning and format of its items. With RSS version 0.9 the differences were minimised. My.userland.com is built on scriptingNews, but also supports RSS.

You can find more details on RSS and scriptingNews in Perl tutorial 8 from my fellow colleague columnist Jonathan Eisenzopf. If you shake your head at Perl syntax (no offense ;-)), a Java solution will be coming your way over here.

URL: https://www.webreference.com/xml/column5/2.html
Created: Jan. 30, 2000
Revised: Jan. 30, 2000

Weaving the Web of News (2/5) - exploring XML