Chapter 2: Introducing Web Feeds

Overview

Web feeds (or simply feeds) are a quickly growing, easy-to-deploy technology that allows both providers and users of the feed easy access to the relevant information. Feeds are regularly updated eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents, generally containing some basic information about the site or group offering the feed, followed by a group of items containing whatever information the feed producers want to disseminate.

Of course, there are a whole host of different uses for web feeds. For example, you could stick a work-related feed onto your intranet site to keep employees up to date on industry news, or you could combine the feeds from various blogs and websites to create a personal start page containing all the sites you read in a condensed format. Just find the feeds you're interested in and away you go!

Obviously, having the ability to view the latest information, in a given subject area and in an easily readable format, can be a huge bonus for a host of businesses and people. Accordingly, this chapter looks at the following:

• What web feeds are

• Important considerations when using feeds

• Key differences between HTML and XML

• Who provides web feeds

• What software uses web feeds

You might be asking yourself whether there are other ways to get information from the Web. Well, in general, feeds are the only reliable (and legal) way to obtain many types of information from other websites in an automated manner. Other methods, such as scraping HTML pages, are not only frowned upon, but may be illegal (if you choose to present this information to others).