Whence RSS?

A while ago in a reply, I mentioned on LinkedIn I had a better functional explanation of what RSS is.  But LinkedIn posts are of limited length, and my explanation wouldn't fit.  So, I'll post it here as best I can and put a link on LinkedIn.

 To whit...

Okay, going to add my explanation of RSS, which stands for "Real Simple Syndication." Not explaining much of the mechanics, just what it is.

So, picture it, Sicily, 1920s... no, maybe not that long ago...

Way back when the Internet was a new thing, and the Web in particular was very new, the way one would find new websites was to poke around on the web till you stumbled across something interesting. Was fun, never knew what or who you might find. I used to do something similar with Gopherblue, which was invented at the University of Minnesota -- similar idea, not as many pictures.

So, you're finding cool new places and want to be able to tell other folks what you found. You do your own webpage, with a Log of the Websites you've found. WebLog for short. Blog for shorter.

Bloggers found each other, and would from time to time go to their friends' blogs to see if they'd posted anything new. Lots of friends, lots of blogs, lots of going and seeing. Fun when you find something, kinda tediously repetitive if they haven't posted new stuff.

Someone had the thought, "It's a repetitive task on a computer, couldn't a program do it? Go check a series of webpages periodically, see if there's something new?" And that could be done, and it sorta worked. Didn't really tell you what was new, though.

Difficult bit was, webpages were designed for humans to read, blogs were mostly designed for humans to read...

Wait... if you produced a special version of your webpage specifically designed for a program to read, that'd work better, huh?  Program goes to that special page, reads it, finds what's new, copies that bit.  Could go to a whole bunch of sites in one long run, find any new stuff, add that to a list, and you read only that new stuff in the program.

The RSS feed is that specialized webpage. Not all that different from the human-readable version, necessarily, but not very readable, doesn't need to be as long as the program can read it.  So, you know what you want in that special RSS page, how about we automate creating that from our entries, so it's always up to date?

The magic happens in that program that goes and look at the RSS feed pages. Runs itself periodically, accumulates the new stuff, keeps it ready for the user to review.

Along come people posting audio to websites.  That reader program just shows any text with it, maybe a link to the audio file... What if we make a special sort of machine-readable link to that file, so the program can grab that audio each time?  And what if we automate that process, too -- I post a new audio file, that RSS feed page automatically includes a link to my file, your reader grabs that on the way by...

Lots of complicated stuff going on there.  But for the listener, and (mostly) for the podcaster, it's simple.

Really Simple.

:-)