what exatly is RSS

I am new to this SEO platform.
now a days i am hearing a lot about RSS and XML , what exatly are they.
what is th exact purpose of the these. when i clicked on some of the RSS icons some html code is being displayed.
what for these is used exatly, can any one plese help me in getting information.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

"This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

what is the exact meaning of this sentence

i came to know that we can see the formated look of xml code when the code is placed in python software.
is it true?
and bye the what are the aggeregators exatly and what are their roles?
id RSS is a common database holding the similar information for all the RSS subscribers fo the same belt?

It means you are looking at an RSS feed in a web browser rather than with an RSS aggregator.

When a web browser looks an an XML file (which is what the RSS file is) it will look for a style declaration which tells it how to display the information contained within the XML file. If it can't find this style declaration (which the RSS does not have because you don't set a style in RSS) then the browser will complain that it can't find the style.

So, it's telling you it's showing an ugly load of crap (the RSS feed) in an almost raw form because it can't find any other way of displaying it, because there's no style information.

I don't know, which piece of Python software are you talking about? As far as I know Python is a programming language. You could write something that will take an RSS feed and show it to you as headings and descriptions using Python, or almost any other programming language.

If you want to see the raw XML file, you can load it in to any text editor, like Notepad, Emacs, Context, whatever you happen to use.


An aggregator is a program that will read the RSS feeds you give it and show you the information in a nice format. It will also check for a new version of the feed at regular times, e.g. every three hours, and show you the most recent information.

Aggregators include: Sage (for Firefox), FeedBurner, NetNewsWire and many others. Some aggregators are web based like Bloglines, My Yahoo and personalized Google.


I can't understand that sentence, but I'll take a guess at what you are asking: RSS is a way of giving summary information about information on a website. The user can user can download and regularly check this summary information without having to visit your website in a web browser.

RSS happens to use XML to store this information. It is not a database, it is a temporary store of information.