Notification with RSS

Samuel Eriksson

Mattias Viberg

What is RSS?

A way of subscribing/publishing to:

• Electronic News papers

• Weblogs

• Podcasts

• Anything?

Why use RSS?

• Saves time

• Relatively simple

• User is in control (compared to e-mail)

But!

• Hard to grasp

• Requires one more tool (currently)

Description<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?><rss version="2.0">

<channel><title>W3Schools</title><link>http://www.w3schools.com</link><description>W3Schools Web Tutorials </description><item>

<title>RSS Tutorial</title><link>http://www.w3schools.com/rss</link><description>Check out the RSS tutorial

on W3Schools.com</description></item>

</channel></rss>

Description (2)

• XML:– All XML elements must have a closing tag – XML tags are case sensitive – All XML elements must be properly nested – Attribute values must always be quoted

Description (3)

• News aggregators– Syndic8, http://www.syndic8.com: The largest

RSS directory with over 300,000 feeds listed.– Daypop, http://www.daypop.com: A large

news oriented RSS aggregator with over 50,000 feeds listed.

– Newsisfree, http://www.newsisfree.com: Another news oriented RSS aggregator with over 18,000 feeds listed

History

First RSS format:• RSS 0.9 Netscape -99

Most commonly used:• RSS 0.91 Netscape by request -99• RSS 1.0 RSS-DEV group -00 (imcompatible with the rest)• RSS 2.0 Dave Weiner -02

Alternative:• Atom Supported by Google!

Example

Demo

Future

• Replace Email?

• Replace browsers?

• RSS vs. Atom