On Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:05:04 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> 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.

You're being fairly obtuse here, Andy.

Go have a look at reader.google.com.  There's a tour on the site that 
shows you how RSS feeds are useful.

Jim

Post a reply to this message