I want to show rss feeds from other websites in one of my pages. I know that html is seen by SEs but javascript isn't, so html would be better as you get fresh content often, but at the same time, that content isn't original. This website is brand new and I want to be very careful and stay away from dupe content. Are rss feeds seen as duplicate content by google?
HTML by itself is just a structural markup language, so it's not going to be able to parse an RSS feed and display it to the user. What you're going to need is a server-side programming language. Do you have PHP installed by any chance? To answer your question about whether they're considered to be duplicate content, they will be only if you parse the contents of the feed word for word and the parsed feed takes up most, if not all, of the page.
yes, by html I meant a parser script that generates html from the feed (such as rss2html). I'm making a page that shows job listings for the website's niche, so perhaps I should generate some unique text to put around the feeds to improve the text/rss ratio
To be honest in order to get done for dope content you pretty much need to copy most of the page including the layout.
The layout doesn't matter. It's the content, hence "duplicate content". You can have two different sites with the exact same HTML and CSS code, but if the content is is as different as night and day, the duplicate content penalty won't apply.
What i mean by layout is you go to site A and copy their -title -article 1 -article 2 -article 3 -about- -FAQ- and then rearrange these on your own page so that it looks like: -FAQ- -article 1 -title -about- -article 2 -article 3 In most cases you will not get penalised.