Feed Buttons

This afternoon, I've been
studying feed buttons.

It seems that feed buttons
fall into two broad categories.

I'm a newbie here. So my thoughts
on this may change. However, right
now, the two categories of feed
buttons are:

1. Raw XML feed buttons
2. Feed buttons that subscribe
   to a specific reader, such as
   Google reader

This threw me when I first started
looking into this. The thing that
threw me is that raw XML feeds look
like web pages in your browser.

It's only when I did a right-click
on the page and asked to
View Source that I realized
that a feed is more than just a web
page. It is a page with lots of
underlying information.

In other words, there are really two
views that can be made of an RSS
feed:

1. Human readable like a web
   page
2. Machine readable as XML
   is a computer language that is
   frequently read and interpreted
   by a machine

OK. I think I'm finally starting to
get the basic idea of what a RSS feed
is. It is raw XML that looks like a
web page if you look at it in a browser.

This helps me as I've been stumbling
around in the dark here.

That's is to say, the illumination has
been coming in the last hour or so
but it has been coming slowly.

Ed Abbott