When I joined CSDN in 2003, my blog just started Popularity. At that time, CSDN already had a “document center”, which collected all the articles published by a certain author on CSDN. No matter from that aspect, I don’t think there is any substantial difference between this blog and the document center. But soonHan Lei told me that blogs can be subscribed. The difference is obvious. Not long after, blogs became popular, and “RSS” became a hot word.
I have a quirk about all the abbreviations I I like to ask what it means. Under normal circumstances, this is very good, can strengthen understanding and memory. However, on the word RSS, I have suffered. Some people told me that RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, and some articles say that the original meaning of RSS is “RDF Site Summary”. What’s more, some people say that it is “Rich Site Summary”. Confused. It took me a lot of effort to understand the ins and outs:
1. In 1999, Netscape released the RSS 0.90 specification, which later became the starting point for RSS 1.0. At this time, RSS stands for RDF Site Summary, because this specification is based on W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) Build it up.
2. In 2001, Netscape released the RSS 0.91 specification. At this time, RSS was no longer based on RDF, but was redesigned, and the name was changed to Rich Site Summary.
3. On the basis of RSS 0.91, the Web community spontaneously established the RSS 2.0 specification, where RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In fact, from a technical point of view, RSS 2.0 has nothing to do with RSS 1.0, but the name seems to be an upgraded version of the same technical specification, which brings confusion in understanding.
4. It is not just a problem of confusion. Whether it is RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0, there are some imperfect designs, such as the handling of angle bracket characters. So later, ATOM was defined as the new syndication standard format.
5. Based on ATOM, the IETF is formulating the ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) protocol, which is a very general application layer protocol for publishing and editing Web resources. It is a protocol tailored for REST, which is worth noting. Google’s GData API is expanded on the basis of APP. However, Microsoft was not satisfied with the APP, so it started anew and developed a Web3S protocol for the same purpose.
In addition, syndication is a very promising term. Syndicate is the etymology of “Syndicate”, and “Syndicate” refers to the Federation of Industry. In the news media industry, “syndicate” refers specifically to newspaper syndicate, that is, publishing the same article or picture for publication in various newspapers in the syndicate. Obviously, this is exactly the same as what we can do with RSS or ATOM on our Web. So syndication is a very accurate word. Many people translate this word as “synchronization”, obviously losing its true meaning.
About the dispute between APP and Web3S,This article on InfoQ< /font>is a good entrance.