Introduction
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Chapter 1. Introduction

KNewsTicker is an applet for the KDE panel (also known as Kicker) which provides an easy and convenient way to access the news as reported by many news sites (such as Slashdot, Linux® Weekly News or Freshmeat).

To achieve this, KNewsTicker requires the news sites to provide a special RSS file, which contains the headlines as well as pointers to the corresponding full articles. Such files are very common these days, and KNewsTicker already comes with a selection of good news sources which provide such files.

Brief Info On RSS Files

RSS files are becoming more and more popular these days, and this applet is not the first application which takes advantage of them. But what are RSS files? This section tries to give a brief answer to this question, as well as pointers to other sources for further reference.

The short answer: RSS is an XML-based format for syndicating web content.

RSS is often used as an acronym for “Rich Site Summary” – that's not a common definition but it gives an idea on what the creators of RSS had in mind. There is no consensus on what RSS stands for, so it's actually not an acronym, it's a name.

RSS originated in 1999 and was invented by NetScape as a syndication format for their my.netscape.com website; this very first RSS release was version 0.9. A few months after that, Netscape® introduced RSS version 0.91, which incorporated many features of the “<scriptingNews>” format.

The basic concept of all RSS files is to provide a clean, simple and portable way to distribute web content, in particular news: the news sites provide an RSS file which basically contains a set of records, and each record consists of a headline and a URL which points to the complete article. The RSS file also contains other general information about the particular news site, such as its name and the homepage, which is evaluated by KNewsTicker.

Nowadays there are a few additional, more sophisticated versions of the RSS format (0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 1.0 and the current format version 2.0) but the first two versions still make up about 85% of the files provided on the web. Nevertheless, all versions up to 2.0 can be processed with KNewsTicker!

Of course, this is only a short and highly incomplete attempt at explaining the basic ideas behind RSS files. If you're interested in this topic, you might want to visit any of the following links which point to further and more complete sources on this:

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/

A very pragmatic introduction to the RSS format, with concrete examples and guidelines. Together with the authoritative specifications, this makes a good guide for people who are thinking about providing an RSS newsfeed on their home page.

http://www.oreillynet.com/rss/

The RSS page from O'Reilly features a lot of general articles about employing and using RSS files, up to date news about the RSS development community as well as vital information for web developers who are considering taking advantage of RSS.

http://blogspace.com/rss/

This page is another excellent source of news about the RSS development, which is especially interesting to developers working with RSS-based technology.

http://www.w3.org/RDF/

The authoritative source about RDF, an XML-based language from which modern RSS versions are derived, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. It features a comprehensive list of links to other sites on the topic as well as a timeline of the RDF development, an overview over the architecture, an archive with articles about RDF as well as a carefully assembled list of tools for developers who intend to work with RDF.

Developers will also want to check the authoritative specifications for the various RSS versions:

If you find any other sites or documents on this topic, and think they are worth being mentioned here, don't hesitate to send them to Frerich Raabe so that they can be included in this document and help everybody.

Thank you very much!

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