RSS

RSS is a family of web feed formats that let a website publish a summary of its latest updates, such as new articles or blog posts, in a standardized structure that other programs can automatically check and display, without a reader needing to visit the site directly to see what is new. The American programmer Dan Libby, working at Netscape, created the first version, called RDF Site Summary, in March 1999 to let Netscape's My Netscape Network portal display headlines pulled automatically from other websites. After Netscape abandoned the format, the writer and programmer Dave Winer of UserLand Software continued developing it under the backronym Really Simple Syndication, and RSS became the standard mechanism by which blogs, news sites and podcasts alike let readers and podcast applications subscribe to new content automatically.