This is a concise yet comprehensive guide to feeds and syndication for content professionals, web developers and marketing teams who want to understand what RSS and content syndication is, how it works, what it can for them, and how they can get it up and running. The feed formats and vocabularies are covered in depth, and the book does require some familiarity with XML, but no scripting or development expertise is necessary.
RSS is examined in detail. The XML vocabulary and document structure is examined and explained clearly. Each element is illustrated with carefully chosen examples. The changes through RSS 0.9x to 2.0 are covered in depth as are extensions and modules such as BitTorrent, EasyNews and others. The style of the book is succinct and precise. The information is densely packed but well structured, making it both readable as an introduction and overview, but also highly functional as a reference. The author is authoritative but friendly in his style, and peppers the text with interesting examples and pertinent URLs. The book assumes a solid knowledge of XML and how the web works, but is not intended to be the exclusive province of the technically minded.
About the Author
Heinz Wittenbrink was born in 1956 in M¿lheim (Ruhr region). He studied literature and philosophy and worked as an editor and then a senior editor for the Bertelsmann Group. He was responsible for several CD ROMs with encyclopedic content, and later, for the development of the first free German encyclopedic website http://www.wissen.de. In 2000 he moved to a Munich-based web agency, and in 2002, founded his own company for online publishing. Since 2004 he has been a professor for web publishing at the University for Applied Sciences in Graz/Austria. He has written books and online teaching material on XML, HTML and CSS. Heinz used RSS for the first time when he developed a news service for a major German magazine publisher. He sees the ease of use and the extensibility of modern syndication formats as their major advantages. He is convinced that RSS and its successors will soon develop from syndication formats used in special contexts (news publishing, weblogs, and so on) to general formats for publishing and archiving online content.