What is XML (or an RSS feed?)

I'm sure some expert will say I'm wrong, but I think of XML as just a web page that contains the information without the formatting. no pretty pictures or anything. easy way to transmit the info.

An XML page can contain invoice info which is sent to a customer electronically. its extremely easy for a computer to parse the data once you decide on a standard.
 
so is it a feed that submits the page, say, to your email? or to a wireless device? and the formatting just makes it easier to read? it's just a tool to allow to you read 'updated' web pages without actually having to logon to the WWW?
 
Every so often they check for new content. I don't know if all of them download the entire page, but I wouldn't doubt that was an option.

Instead of having to sift through a bunch of crap to see if there are any new stories on CNN.com, you could view the headlines in a simple format.
 
I'll try to cut to the skinny here. This is sort of complex. XML is just a set of rules for a markup language. To most people that's not going to make any sense, so I'll want to define it by what it is and can be used for. But even that is too tough because the potential applications of XML are extraordinarily broad. So I'l just describe XML as it pertains to RSS news feeds:

A standard called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a subset of XML. News sites and almost all blogs publish stories in RSS format. This format is rigid and allows people to use RSS news readers to collect news from a variety of websites. Instead of visiting 10-20 websites, you can just open an RSS news reader and cull the news from all of those websites to one point-of-entry. It's a neat idea, but very few people bother using RSS.
 
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