On 20/06/07, Hiram Clawson hiram@soe.ucsc.edu wrote:
How does one read an RSS feed ? Does an email client take care of that business, a WEB browser, or a special client ?
All three, depending upon the software.
RSS is just a simple, machine-readable format based more or less on XML, and there are a variety of clients which can convert this information into a more human-readable form.
For example, Mozilla Thunderbird, and a number of email clients, can subscribe to RSS feeds. A large number of browsers, including things like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox can handle RSS feeds - Firefox refers to these as "live bookmarks". And there are dedicated RSS clients.
Of course, RSS feeds can be read back into web applications and used server-side, and there are RSS aggregation extensions for MediaWiki.
Rob Church