For people born after the 90s (no one here I suppose), this was Active Desktop:

Instead of a static image, show a Dynamic Web page refreshed every X minutes. Good memories of the old .com web portals of that age

@movq@uninformativ.de Active Desktop and Channels were related but the latter is more related to RSS, on receiving new content automatically. Active desktop was only showing a web page.

If I remember correctly, Internet Explorer 4.0 introduced a ‘standard’ to get low-bandwidth notifications to know when new content was available, but I can’t recall if it were only the notification, or if you can read everything there, as you can do with RSS: Push technology

Edit: I found it Channel Definition Format