A family of XML file formats for Web syndication used by (among other things) news websites and weblogs. The abbreviation has been used to refer to three different standards: Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91), RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0), and Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0).
RSS technology allows Internet users to subscribe to web sites that have provided RSS “feeds.” Most often, these are sites that change or add content regularly. To use RSS technology, site owners create or obtain specialized software (such as a content management system) which, in the machine-readable XML format, presents new articles in a list, giving a line or two of each article and a link to the full article or post. Unlike subscriptions to many premium websites (or print newspapers and magazines), most RSS subscriptions are free.
RSS formats define the creators’ web content or summaries of that content together with links to the full versions of the content and other metadata. This information is delivered as an XML file (called an RSS feed). In addition to accommodating syndication, RSS allows a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using software called aggregators.