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RSS glossary

The words that come up in these guides. You do not need to know any of them to use a reader.

How to use this list

Using RSS takes one skill — pasting a site URL — and none of the words below are required. This page exists so there is somewhere to come back to when one of the other guides uses a term you have not met.

Each entry is written from the reader’s point of view: what it changes for the person subscribing.

Glossary

RSS
The mechanism by which a site publishes a machine-readable list of what it posted recently. Loosely, it is also used as an umbrella term covering Atom and JSON Feed.
Atom
A later format that tightened up the parts of RSS left ambiguous. A unique per-item ID and a date are required, which makes duplicate articles less likely.
JSON Feed
The same idea expressed in JSON rather than XML. It came later, for implementations that would rather not handle XML. For a reader the difference is invisible.
Feed
The list of updates itself, or the URL it is published at. Subscribing to RSS means registering that URL.
Feed reader
Software or a service that fetches your subscribed feeds on a schedule and shows what is new. Also called an RSS reader.
OPML
The format for carrying a subscription list and its folder structure between services. It has no field for read state, stars or tags, so those do not move.
WebSub
A mechanism for a site to notify subscribers when a feed changes (formerly PubSubHubbub). Where a feed supports it, new items arrive without waiting for the next scheduled fetch.
Hub
The server that relays WebSub notifications. Which hub a feed uses is declared inside the feed itself.
Enclosure
The field carrying a file attached to an item. Podcast audio lives here.
Full-text feed
A feed carrying whole article bodies, as opposed to an opening excerpt. Which one you get is a site setting, not a property of the format.
Permalink
The stable per-article URL. Readers sometimes use it to decide whether two entries are the same article, so a site changing how it builds URLs can make old articles reappear as new.
Pseudo-feed
A feed assembled by reading headings out of a page’s HTML, for sites that publish no feed. Missed updates and false positives are more likely than with a real feed.
Conditional GET
A fetch that carries information from the previous one, saying "skip the body if nothing changed". It exists to keep load off the site being fetched.
noindex
An instruction telling search engines not to list a page. Here it is applied to feed pages holding too few articles to be worth indexing.

Other guides