Web Feeds

A Web feed is a method for subscribing to frequently updated content, which is published by a website. If a website has a “feed”, it means that you can subscribe to it and receive the updates, whenever that content is updated. The phrase “syndication” refers to the fact that users can subscribe to it. Web feeds give us a new method of publishing and accessing content online. You need a feed reader to view the content.


Using a Web feed, you can subscribe to a Web page and receive updates whenever the administrator for that page made any changes. With Web 1.0, you needed to go to the Web page each time, to see if there was new content.

What type of content can a feed display?
Web feeds can display links to existing Web pages or files, or display text, images, and embeded videos. Since blogs automatically generate a feed, all of the information on the post is displayed. Podcasts (to be covered later) use feeds, but they usually only bring in the audio or video file.


Really Simple Syndication - RSS

A web feed is a text file that is written in the XML language and saved with a .xml extension. A feed uses either the RSS or Atom specification, also technically XML languages. Since most feeds use RSS, the term "feed" and "RSS" have become synonymous.