問54
頻出度★★★
Web サイトの更新状況の把握に関して，次の記述中の a，b に入れる字句の適切な組合せはどれか。 指定した Web サイトを巡回し，Web サイトの見出しや要約などを小さくまとめた [ a ] と呼ばれる更新情報を取得してリンク一覧を作成するソフトウェアを [ b ] リーダという。
平成24年度 秋期 ITパスポート試験 問54
テクノロジ系ネットワーク › ネットワーク応用
This question's explanation and your answers so far.
解説
問 54
Incorrectア
Both a and b are wrong. The thumbnail in a is a small sample image of a picture or a web page shrunk to about the size of a thumb's nail, used to make it easier to find the target image or page in a list view. It is nothing more than a reduced image, not the kind of text data the passage calls “update information that summarizes headlines and abstracts”. The CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in b is a language for specifying the appearance (style) of a web page built with HTML — text color, fonts, layout, and so on. It has nothing to do with a mechanism that goes around collecting update information, and no software called a CSS reader exists.
Incorrectイ
The RSS in b is correct, but the thumbnail in a is wrong. What an RSS reader obtains is a feed in text form that describes headlines, abstracts, update dates and times, link URLs, and the like, not a thumbnail, which is a reduced image. The passage also says “a compact summary of the headlines and abstracts”; what is made compact is not an image but the content of the update information. If you misread this “compact (small)” as shrinking an image, you will pick the thumbnail, so take care: what goes in a is feed.
Incorrectウ
The feed in a is correct, but the CSS in b is wrong. CSS is a mechanism for defining a web page's display style separately from the HTML itself; it only plays the role of arranging how a document looks, and it has no function for crawling sites and collecting update information. The software that subscribes to and obtains feeds and builds a list of new items is an RSS reader (feed reader), and the term CSS reader does not even exist. RSS and CSS are both three-letter abbreviations that look similar, but RSS is a distribution format for update information while CSS is a style-specification language, so their roles are completely different.
- エ
正解 The correct answer is エ, “a-Feed, b-RSS”. For blank a, notice that the passage itself supplies the definition: “update information called [ a ] (a compact summary of the website's headlines and abstracts)”. Data that extracts only the update information about a website's new articles — the title, the summary, the update date and time, the link URL — and packages it in a machine-readable form for distribution is called a feed. The key point is that it is not the site's content itself but “a list of update notices”, which matches the description in the passage exactly, with nothing added or missing. Blank b is the name of the software that periodically obtains that feed and builds a list of links. The representative XML-based format for writing feeds (and the distribution mechanism built on it) is RSS, and software that automatically crawls the RSS feeds of several sites and shows their new headlines in a single list is called an RSS reader (also called a feed reader or an aggregator). Instead of opening every site one by one, the user only has to look at the list in the RSS reader to grasp the update status of all the sites they have subscribed to at once, and can jump from an interesting headline's link to the article itself. This is the mechanism that makes “keeping track of the update status of websites”, the theme of this question, efficient. Therefore feed goes in a and RSS goes in b, and エ, which combines them, is correct.
ここがポイント
- The relationship between a feed and RSS — a feed is distribution data that gathers a website's update information such as headlines, abstracts, update dates and times, and link destinations, and the representative format for writing it is RSS (Atom is of the same kind). Software that automatically obtains the feeds of several sites and builds a list of new headlines is an RSS reader (feed reader); with it you can grasp the update status of all those sites together without visiting each one individually.
- Telling confusable terms apart — a thumbnail is a reduced sample image of a picture or a web page (a display technique that makes things easier to find), not update information. CSS is a style sheet language that specifies how a web page looks (text color, layout, and so on); it resembles RSS in being a three-letter abbreviation, but its role is unrelated. With abbreviations, always go back to the full name and the purpose in order to tell them apart.
用語