Simplicity is the key to RSS

In the world of technology, it's always refreshing to come across something that's simple.

I've recently discovered the delights of Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS. Although there's no consensus as to what RSS actually stands for, it's now generally accepted as a name, rather than an acronym.

It's one of those technologies that's been known to a relatively hard core of technically-aware web users for quite a long time, but is only just starting to make inroads into the mainstream.

As with many web technologies, a lack of documentation means that the roots of RSS are steeped in controversy, but I don't want to get into that here.

(Incidentally, the lack of reliable archived source material means that web history will become a nightmare area of research in a few decades.)

Suffice it to say, RSS is an amalgamation of various attempts to produce a simple way of dynamically syndicating content from a website.

Microsoft and Apple both featured in the technology's very early days, with formats called CDF (Channel Definition Format) and MCF (Meta Content Format) respectively.

Netscape acquired Apple's MCF format and in 1999 unveiled an XML-based syndication format called RSS.

The intention was to provide a simple standard that allowed users of My Netscape (a now-defunct customisable personal portal) to add content from websites with a single click. Netscape dropped RSS support in 2001 and everyone thought that was the end of it.

However, having got used to the power and simplicity of RSS, users realised that they could do things that weren't dependent on the existence of Netscape.

Hence the development of 'aggregator' applications that take RSS feeds from any number of websites and display them in a single location. Add in filtering capabilities and you've got your own personalised news site.

An RSS feed is simply an XML document that can be viewed in a text editor. It can be created easily by website owners using Perl scripts, for example to periodically extract content and create a new RSS file.

The process can be fully automated, so any change in a site's content - a breaking news headline, for example - will automatically be updated in any aggregator application that subscribes to this feed.

I've been trying the open source SharpReader (www.sharpreader.net) and have been impressed at how easy it is to set up my own collection of news sources.

It's amazing how much time you save by not having to go to each site individually to check headlines. Any story you're interested in is immediately accessible with a single click, which opens in a SharpReader view pane.

However, it's not just news that can be syndicated. Thousands of weblog users ('bloggers') are providing RSS feeds so that their dedicated fans can keep up to date with the latest pearls of wisdom.

As the technology is so simple and robust, new users are appearing all the time. Of course, the tricky bit is that as RSS becomes more popular, people will want to add extra functionality - and this way lies doom.

Once it becomes too complex, the barriers to entry will rise and people will abandon it. Although RSS version 2.0 exists, the most popular version is still the old 0.91 standard, because it's simple, it works and doesn't need an SDK to implement.

Those fighting for flashy enhancements would do well to remember KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

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