Chapter 1. How an RSS Feed Works

Let's consider a scenario that happens millions of times every day on the Internet: A person visits a web site like http://xml.com and discovers they really like the content. They don't wish to visit the web site every day looking for new content, but they are much more willing to "subscribe" to the web site and have updates sent to them.

This is where RSS comes in. New content on a web site can be delivered to readers through an RSS 2.0 feed, which is special file format designed to contain news, articles, and other periodically updated content. The file format is designed so that it can be easily read by various computer applications.