Tuesday, December 30, 2003
RSS to change the face of the web?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML format designed to allow the sharing of information between websites. An RSS feed provides headlines, brief descriptions and links to the original material in a standard format, which RSS readers can display.
So why is it important? Well, it's currently used by providers to extend the reach of their material - the BBC have many tens of RSS feeds available, and they are not alone - technical publications such as VUNet and others use it heavily too. The rise of blogging has fuelled this, allowing bloggers to make their thoughts more accessible to all.
But I think a sea-change is on the horizon - readers are becoming more powerful, and more importantly, integrated into websites, and screen scraping is becoming more advanced. This can lead, in a very short timescale, to web applications that allow people to construct their own websites containing fragements of anyone else's. Anyone, because we can quite easily scrape or make an RSS feed from any HTML.
This is important in two senses. Firstly, and most fundamentally, we have split the web atom - previously atomic units were web pages - once you'd got them you could analyse them into text and graphics, but you generally dealt in whole pages. Now our atomic unit is much smaller - we can construct things out of fragments of pages. And this makes a second difference - consumers can look only at what they want to, can miss adverts and poor material out; producres have to think smaller scale and making their stuff work on segmented as well as page levels. Copyright will become a big issue (and the law may well need altering), our shorter attnetion spans better catered for, and pretty layouts will take a backseat compared to content.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML format designed to allow the sharing of information between websites. An RSS feed provides headlines, brief descriptions and links to the original material in a standard format, which RSS readers can display.
So why is it important? Well, it's currently used by providers to extend the reach of their material - the BBC have many tens of RSS feeds available, and they are not alone - technical publications such as VUNet and others use it heavily too. The rise of blogging has fuelled this, allowing bloggers to make their thoughts more accessible to all.
But I think a sea-change is on the horizon - readers are becoming more powerful, and more importantly, integrated into websites, and screen scraping is becoming more advanced. This can lead, in a very short timescale, to web applications that allow people to construct their own websites containing fragements of anyone else's. Anyone, because we can quite easily scrape or make an RSS feed from any HTML.
This is important in two senses. Firstly, and most fundamentally, we have split the web atom - previously atomic units were web pages - once you'd got them you could analyse them into text and graphics, but you generally dealt in whole pages. Now our atomic unit is much smaller - we can construct things out of fragments of pages. And this makes a second difference - consumers can look only at what they want to, can miss adverts and poor material out; producres have to think smaller scale and making their stuff work on segmented as well as page levels. Copyright will become a big issue (and the law may well need altering), our shorter attnetion spans better catered for, and pretty layouts will take a backseat compared to content.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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