Syndication, RSS, RDF and Atom in a Nutshell
Once upon a time, there was a company called Netscape who was investigating a new market: portal sites and content syndication. The idea was simple: a variety of websites produce relevant content in a (nearly) continuous flow. Portals would be designed to aggregate news and content from those sites and present it to the user all in one page…
Thus, Netscape invented a format called RSS, which stood for “Remote Site Syndication”. This spec allows content producers to publish their news/content in an “RSS feed” (an XML based document) and content consumers to periodically check those feeds for updates.
When Netscape lost interest in developing portals, they abandonned their original (and complex) RSS 0.9 spec as well as their efforts in creating a more appropriate and simpler version. At that time, UserLand picked up the simpler 0.91 spec and applied it to its blog tools. RSS had become “Really Simple Syndication”.
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