Wittenbrink - RSS and Atom: understanding and implementing content feeds and syndication ; [covers RSS 2.0, RSS 1.1, RSS 1.0, RSS 0.9x, Atom 1.0, and all important extensions to these formats]

Do we need a book about newsfeeds, RSS, and the new format, Atom? After all, they are pure online formats, and there is a multitude of sources available on the Web to obtain information. Why should someone want information available on the Web on paper? The reason why only a few books on newsfeeds currently exist is because the formats themselves are easy to use; there is not much need for explanation. The complexity of RSS becomes evident only if one actually compares the different formats for newsfeeds. It is then that one realizes that the differences between the formats lie in the different ideas of the Webs architecture, its future development, as well as the role of technological standards.

With this book, I would like to try to explain these connections, and thereby explain why there are different formats for a task that is actually easy to achieve. In addition, a book offers the chance to deal systematically with this technology, to get an overview of the different formats, and to compare them synoptically. Linear and three dimensional at the same time, the book as a medium offers opportunities for insight and overview, which are superior to the two-dimensional screen.

It has been some time since I was first confronted with newsfeeds. The great potential hidden behind the three letters "RSS" became obvious to me when I had to provide a client with up-to-date news on online media. I subscribed to feeds of a great number of news sources and was able to analyze a lot more material than would have been possible through traditional websites. Also, RSS was a useful format with respect to my own deliveries to my clients. RSS documents have the structure needed for up-to-date messages which reference sources on the Web, and they are easy to transform into different formats. I knew RSS because I had been reading weblogsDave Winers ScriptingNews, Doc Searlss weblog, David Weinbergers "Joho the Blog!," the "Schockwellenreiter," and "langreiter.com"daily for a few years already.

I was preparing a presentation on RSS as a technology and its possibilities for online publishing, and thats when I realized that there is no book on RSS available on the German market. That was when the idea for this book was developed.

Because I was also observing the American market concerning online media for my client, I realized the enormous commercial possibilities that newsfeeds, and services that are based on newsfeeds, open up. Moreover.com established itself very successfully as a provider of generated newsfeeds on the news market; Daypop and Feedster went online as the first search engines that specialized in RSS feeds and weblogs.

Like in most areas of online publishing, here, too, it was a long time before Europe discovered the possibilities of the new format. The first feed formats didnt include much more than headlines, links, and short descriptions of news on HTML pages.

Atom, the newest feed format can, however, transport any kind of content. Additionally, Atom includes a "publishing protocol" or API, defining a complete provider-neutral publication environment for periodically updated Web content. Furthermore, Atom allows the archiving newsfeeds and their parts and to clearly and permanently identify them. With Atom, newsfeeds have finally become a publication format in its own right. It doesnt need a lot of imagination to see that that the classical HTML page will soon play an inferior role compared to continuously updated feeds, as a format for static content like tutorials, scientific texts, reference material, and presentations.

While I was working on the book it dawned on me that newsfeeds are much more than a practical means and a basis for business ideas in online publishing. Newsfeedstogether with formats like RSS and Atomhave already changed our idea of online publishing as a whole, and will change them even more radically in the future. Since the first years of the Web, our image of online publishing has been determined by the HTML pagea format similar to a book page that is presented static and square on the screen and can be upgraded through newspaper-like layouts to a "portal." In the beginning, newsfeeds had a secondary task; they were developed as guideposts for HTML pages, and allowed for headlines and contents of a page to be built into other pages as a teaser. Step by step, they themselves conquered more and more functions of HTML pages: they incorporated Web content including the typography and the images.

With newsreaders and aggregators, a kind of software established itself that enabled a user to read newsfeeds outside of browsers. Through APIs, they turned into a format that makes it very easy to publish weblogs, thereby losing the status of a secondary product. Newsfeed formats made a pivotal contribution to making the vision of the "Writable Web" become reality for the every-day Web usera few clicks in a weblog system and every Web user could be a Web author. Since the introduction of podcasting in 2004, newsfeeds have become the format for Web-compatible broadcasting of audio and video content.