Syndication has made a significant impact on how information on the web is produced and consumed. I read more articles via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds than from the source web pages. My feed reader is part of my daily routine.
The elements in the RSS vocabulary provide metadata about the content, such as the title, the author, description and originating site, in such a way that it can be shared through what is called an RSS feed. These feeds can be used to display content from one web site onto another, or be organized and read through RSS-aware software called feed readers (or news readers).
The development of RSS is complicated political drama, and most instructive on the difficulties of developing standards. The result is that RSS developers divided into two factions : the RDF or RSS 1.0 group and the RSS 2.0 group. This fork has been well documented from political, generalist, and insider perspectives. While they conflict with each other, later versions of each fork are backward-compatible with earlier versions (except for the non-conformant RDF syntax in 0.90), and both forks include properly documented extension mechanisms using XML Namespaces. These issues spurred the development of a third new syndication specification, Atom in June 2003, which has also been accepted as a proposed standard.
Fortunately, most feed readers support all branches.
