They come in two
flavors, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom, though virtually all applications that
read webfeeds can process both formats. Webfeeds represent one of the first popular applications
of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the stricter big brother of HTML.
Most webfeeds, as with most websites, are text-based, but feeds can also carry multimedia
attachments with sound and video ready to be played on your computer, or transferred to
your portable music player. This technology has given rise to the podcast industry, where
everyone from TV and radio networks to your friend down the street is delivering news
and commentary on most every topic under the sun.
You need an application called an aggregator to collect and read webfeeds from across the
Web. If you see a little orange square on a site, this indicates a webfeed is available.
Clicking this icon lets you ???subscribe??? to the site??™s feed, though you often have to go
through a few extra steps to complete the process, depending on your browser and your
aggregator. We??™ll cover these idiosyncrasies in this section.
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