What is RSS?
A new way to communicate via the Internet was introduced in the late 1990s. This third communication mode (after the World Wide Web and E-Mail) is called RSS for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites like SafetyLit. The technology of RSS allows Internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites like SafetyLit that change or add content regularly. RSS is widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text. To use this technology, site owners create or obtain specialized software, 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. Because the process of preparing an RSS feed can be automated, it will be simple to link feed creation to the system of assigning categories to SafetyLit items and to provide the opportunity for users to subscribe to any of many categorical feeds without (as is the case with the SafetyLit email update service) needing to wade through items about topics of little interest. Thus, it is now possible to receive the weekly SafetyLit update with content limited to the reader's topic(s) of interest. Unlike subscriptions to email lists, it is impossible for someone to receive an unwanted RSS feed and unlike email there is no way for a subscriber to receive unwanted vulgar messages so there is no need for screening software that can blindly block wanted email messages because they (to a computer program) resemble messages that appear to be unwanted.