RSS is a mechanism for web site developer to publish headlines and frequently update from a web feed. A web feed is a low-bandwidth, stripped down version of a web site that readers can subscribe to in a feed reader or that developers can parse and manipulate for their own use. There are a number of competing technical formats for feeds on the web including several different incompatible versions of RSS and a competing format called Atom. Yahoo web feeds all conform to the RSS 2.0 specification and thus we refer to our feeds simply as RSS feeds.
RSS files are XML. If you view an RSS file in a web browser most of the time you will see raw XML text and not a formatted page like you do HTML. To view an RSS feed properly, you need to subscribe to that feed in a feed reader such as My Yahoo. Other feed readers include Feedly, Flipboard, Skimr, or The Old Reader. Your email application may also provide a way of reading feeds.
A number of RSS feeds, however, take arguments or parameters, which enable you to generate different custom RSS feeds depending on the specific content you are interested in. For example, the Yahoo Weather feeds take parameters for zip code or location ID and look something like this:
http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=USCA1116These latter RSS URLs with parameters are called custom or dynamic RSS feeds. Note that the content of all RSS feeds is dynamic (it changes on a regular basis). The term dynamic refers to the ability to generate multiple feeds from the same URL. Because dynamic RSS feeds are often more interesting to developers, we provide enhanced API documentation for many of these feeds on the Yahoo Developer Network.
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