RSS Basics - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 10

You've probably heard the term RSS feed bantered about. An RSS ile is
called a feed in the same way that an HTML ile is called a Web page. RSS
feeds carry summary data about the latest articles on or additions to a Web
site. (So in essence, a nicely structured RSS feed summarizes new content
that's oten made available in chaotic, unstructured HTML pages.)
he data in an RSS feed is broken down by title and summary, and contains
additional information, including when the summary was generated, where
it came from, who the author is, what language it's in, and so on. Some RSS
feeds carry only headlines of new information, while others carry summa-
ries—the title of a new article and maybe the irst 20 words of that arti-
cle—while still others are called “full feeds” that contain all the text (and
sometimes multimedia) available from a Web site. In other words, you can
read the content of a site without having to visit the site at all ( Figure 2.1 )!
Figure 2.1
the international
herald tribune offers
a bevy of feeds that
provides content
without your having to
visit the Web site.