Summary

Atom and RSS provide a means of sharing information and providing a (relatively) standard means of notifying users of change. The rise of blogs, podcasts, and RSS aggregators mean that more and more people are using RSS, even if they are not aware of it. Most common browsers even handle and display RSS and Atom. In addition, future versions of Windows will ship with built-in infrastructure for downloading and displaying these feeds. RSS and Atom are rapidly becoming an important dialect of XML.