About News Feeds
News feeds are documents which list recent updates to a website. Countless applications have been developed to read these documents so people can find out when their favorite websites have been updated.
Here, the BBC can tell you all about it. And while you're there, subscribe to one of their news feeds so you can find out what happening in the world.
As for my news feeds, I keep two now because sometimes you want summaries and sometimes you want the whole shebang.
Summaries Only, RSS 2.0
This is what I consider to be the true news feed, but that's because I never use news feeds to browse content. I use my web brower for that. For me, a news feed helps me select what I want to read. And I think using a news feed this way will keep the internet from becoming a howling wilderness full of broken and malformed documents.
But who am I to argue? Nobody, really.
Full content, Atom
The full-content feed will deliver the full content of the last five entries to your news reader which you may peruse at your leisure. This uses the Atom specification which has everything and a bucket in it, which is why it's not called Really Simple Syndication.
Now, I'm not even going to start ranting about the fact that this news feed has incomplete HTML grafted into another XML specification. Egads, that's horrid! What's next? Embedding Word documents in our news feeds?
Hem. It's no fun to be a purist.
