What is an RSS Channel, Anyway?
Mark Nottingham,
MNot,
Nov 26, 2002
If you are not steeped in RSS and content syndication, you might find this a bit of an obscure discussion. For fun you can count the number of ways 'RSS' is defined in the first few paragraphs. But there are some important conceptual bits. First, an RSS channel is an information flow, "a course or pathway through which information is transmitted." This captures in an important way the dynamic nature of RSS (think in terms of "dynamic asynchronous communication" as referring to a rapidly changing asynchronous environment, such as a weblog, as compared to "static asynchronous communication" in which the content does not change rapidly, as in a web page). Second, "the flow nature of RSS needs to be aligned with that of the Web, as explained by Representational State Transfer (REST)." An RSS feed is a snapshot of a location, the transport protocol used to access the location, and the format in which date from that location is transmitted.
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