XML is not (always) RSS

Recently RSS has become the "in thing" and an example of the Web 2.0 craze. Many webmasters are adding RSS feeds to their sites because of this. When an RSS feed is added to a site, the RSS () icon is used so that it is globally recognised. Alternatively, the feed () icon is used to link to RSS or Atom feeds.

This would be alright if only these 2 icons were used, but many webmasters thought "RSS is XML so lets use an XML logo". They preceded to place an XML ( XML ) logo on their websites. The are a few problems with this:

The user might recognise the XML () logo and not the RSS () icon or the feed () icon. Why should the user be expected to recognise all three images?
User jumps to the conclusion that XML is RSS. They both are used to point to the same files so they must mean the same thing. Later on this causes problems when they decide that since an Office file is XML then it must be RSS.
Have you tried explaining what XML stands for?

If you do have a feed on your website, please use the RSS () icon or the feed () icon.

For those people who are still unsure of which is which, Wikipedia defines RSS with the following statement:

RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favourite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. Some websites let people choose between RSS or Atom formatted web feeds; others offer only RSS or only Atom.

and also says that:

RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "web feed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".

On a separate page, Wikipedia defines XML as the following:

The Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose mark-up language for creating special-purpose mark-up languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. In other words, XML is a way of describing data. An XML file can contain the data too, as in a database. It is a simplified subset of Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML). Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, Geography Mark-up Language (GML), RDF/XML, RSS, Atom, MathML, XHTML, SVG, XUL, EAD, Klip and MusicXML) are defined in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their particular form.

Another view is that XML is a wide standard to encode structured information.

Tags: Atom, Feed, Image, Logo, Miscellaneous, Rss, Web 2, Wikipedia, Xml

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