On 02/02/2012 02:50 AM, Darren New wrote:
> On 1/31/2012 1:12, Invisible wrote:
>> As usual with Wikipedia, the page babbles about updates and feeds and XML
>> and "syndication" and something about RDF, but utterly fails to
>> explain WHAT
>> IT IS.
>
> I have to ask... Do you start reading at the beginning of the article,
> or do you skip over the part that comes before the table of contents or
> something?
>
> First sentence in the article:
>
> "RSS ... is a family of ... formats used to publish frequently updated
> works ... in a standardized format."
>
> How is that not telling you what it is?

HTML is "a family of formats used to publish works [frequently updated 
or not] in a standardized format". As is PDF. As is PostScript. How is 
RSS different?

Sometimes the dictionary definition of what something is turns out not 
to be very enlightening. For example, you could say that

   "A knife is a device constructed from a hard material, usually in the 
shape of a triangular prism who's cross-section has a very acute angle 
between two of the sides."

Or you could say "a knife is a device for cutting things". The latter is 
infinitely more illuminating.

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