Web feed
Web Design & Development Guide
Web feed
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A typical web feed logo
A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated
content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing
users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in
one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an Internet
aggregator.
In the typical scenario of using web feeds, a content provider publishes a
feed link on their site which
end users can register with an
aggregator
program (also called a feed reader or a news reader) running on
their own machines; doing this is usually as simple as dragging the link from
the web
browser to the aggregator. When instructed, the aggregator asks all the
servers in its feed list if they have new content; if so, the aggregator either
makes a note of the new content or downloads it. Aggregators can be scheduled to
check for new content periodically.
The kinds of content delivered by a web feed are typically
HTML (webpage
content) or links to webpages and other kinds of digital media. Often when
websites provide web feeds to notify users of content updates, they only include
summaries in the web feed rather than the full content itself.
Web feeds are operated by many news
websites,
weblogs,
schools, and
podcasters.
Benefits
Web feeds also have some advantages compared to receiving frequently
published content via email:
- When subscribing to a feed, users do not disclose their email address,
so users are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email:
spam, viruses,
phishing,
and identity theft.
- If users want to stop receiving news, they do not have to send an
"unsubscribe" request; users can simply remove the feed from their
aggregator.
- The feed items are automatically "sorted" in the sense that each feed
URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box, where all mails are in
one big pile and email programs have to resort to complicated rules and
pattern matching).
A "Feed Reader" is required for using Web Feeds. This tool works like an
automated e-mail program, but no e-mail address is needed. The user subscribes
to a particular web feed, and thereafter receives updated contents, every time
updating takes place. Feed Readers may be online (like a webmail account) or
offline. Recently a number of mobile readers have arrived to the market. An
offline web feed is downloaded to the user's system. Feed readers are used in
personalized home page services like My Google or My Yahoo or My MSN to put
content such as news, weather and stock quotes appear on the user’s personal
page. Content from other sites can also be added to that personalized page,
again using feeds. Organizations can use a web feed server behind their firewall
to distribute, manage and track the use of internal and external web feeds by
users and groups. Other web-based tools are primarily dedicated to feed-reading
only. One of the most popular web-based feed readers at this point is Bloglines,
which is also free. Firefox, Internet Explorer 7.0, and many other web browsers allow receipts of feeds
from the tool bar using Live Bookmarks, Favorites, and other
techniques to integrate feed reading into a browser. Finally, there are
desktop-based feed readers, e.g. Newsgator and Feed Demon. These are like email
programs for web
Scraping
The usual way is that a web feed is made available by the same entity that
created the content. Typically the feed comes from the same place as the
website. However not all websites provide a feed. Sometimes third parties will
read the website and create a feed for it by
scraping it.
Sometimes this is done by tools that are hand crafted for each particular
website. There are also automatic tools such as
IrisFeed,
feedmaker,
Feedity,
Feed43,
Feedyes,
Page2RSS,
WEB2RSS.
Scraping is controversial since it distributes the content in a manner that
was not chosen by the content owner.
Technical definition
A web feed is a
document (often XML-based) which contains content items with web links to longer
versions. News websites and blogs are common sources for web feeds, but feeds
are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to
"top ten" lists of hit tunes to
search results. The two main web feed formats are
RSS and
Atom.
"Publishing a feed" and "syndication"
are two of the more common terms used to describe making available a feed for an
information source, such as a blog. Like syndicated print newspaper features or
broadcast programs, web feed contents may be shared and republished by other
websites. (For that reason, one popular definition of RSS is
Really Simple Syndication.)
More often, feeds are subscribed to directly by users with
aggregators
or feed readers, which combine the contents of multiple web feeds for display on
a single screen or series of screens. Some modern
web browsers incorporate aggregator features. Depending on the aggregator, users
typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or
clicking a link in a web browser.
Web feeds are designed to be
machine-readable rather than human-readable, which tends to be a source of confusion when people first
encounter web feeds. This means that web feeds can also be used to automatically
transfer information from one website to another, without any human
intervention.
See also
References and external links
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