The Handbook
is a program to read RSS and other online news feeds.

Introduction

What is ?
is a application for reading online news feeds. It has a powerful, user-friendly interface for reading feeds and the management of them.
is a lightweight and fast program for displaying news items provided by feeds, supporting all commonly-used versions of RSS and Atom feeds. Its interface is similar to those of e-mail programs, thus hopefully being very familiar to the user. Useful features include searching within article titles, management of feeds in folders and setting archiving preferences. Feeds can be displayed in a similar manner to e-mails. Websites related to a feed can be shown in 's embedded browser or, at the users' choice, opened in an external browser.

RSS and Atom feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an -based format used for publishing news or articles in a machine-readable form. An RSS or Atom file is also called a feed. A program that can be used to read such feeds is called a feed reader or aggregator, hence the title of the application, .
automatically extracts new items from the feed and displays them in a human-friendly form to the user. The user can therefore save time with regularly-visited websites, as they need no longer manually check whether there are new pieces of information available.
RSS is available in different versions which are not compatible with each other (this situation caused by competing companies): RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. Atom is also an -based feed language which has been redesigned to fit the needs of webloggers and news sites. Atom attempts to replace RSS feeds and remove the uncertainty with incompatibilities in the different RSS versions.