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This work is licensed under a CC
Attribution 3.0 Unported License [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/]
For many information sources on the Web, it is useful to have some standardized way of subscribing to information updates. Syndication formats such as RSS and Atom can be used by these information sources to publish a feed of updated information items. Feeds can be read directly in a browser, but in most cases they are read by specialized software; either a feed reader that allows users to subscribe to more than one feed and manage the information received through all these feeds, or some software module that reads feeds and embeds them for example in a Web page. This latter example is the classical usage of feeds; news feeds published by news agencies, and them embedded as news tickers into Web pages as a constantly updated source of information.
The Myth of RSS Compatibility [http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss]provides a good overview
why standards are a good thing
xml:lang
and xml:base
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="en-us"> <title>ongoing</title> <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/</id> <link rel='self' href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom"/> <updated>2007-04-11T12:55:09-07:00</updated> <author> <name>Tim Bray</name> </author> <subtitle>ongoing fragmented essay by Tim Bray</subtitle> <entry xml:base="When/200x/2007/04/02/"> <title>Atom Publishing Protocol Interop!</title> <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/04/02/APP-Interop</id> <published>2007-04-02T13:00:00-07:00</published> <updated>2007-04-10T14:24:00-07:00</updated> <category scheme="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/" term="Technology/Atom"/> <category scheme="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/" term="Technology"/> <category scheme="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/" term="Atom"/> <content type="xhtml"> <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <p>Mark your calendar: <a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/April2007Interop">April 16-17 at Google</a>. <em>Everybody</em> is invited, provided they bring along an APP implementation, client or server. This was just announced a couple of days ago, and as I write this there are already <s>six</s> twelve client and <s>seven</s> fourteen server implementations signed up to be there and try to <a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/InteropGrid">fill in the grid</a>. Let’s drop some names, in alphabetical order: AOL, Flock, Google, IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, O’Reilly, Six Apart, Sun, WordPress. Um, have I mentioned that the APP is going to be huge?</p> </div> </content> </entry> </feed>
smartabout what the RSS author really wanted
text
)text
, no child elements are allowed (plain text content)html
then RSS's method of escaped markup is usedxhtml
then there must be an div containing XHTML markuptext/
then no child elements are allowed<content type="xhtml"> <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> One <strong>bold</strong> foot forward </div> </content>[http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1633]
<content>The "atom:content" element either contains or links to the content of the entry. The content of atom:content is Language-Sensitive.</content>[http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1633]
<content type="html">The <code>atom:content</code> element either contains or links to the content of the entry. The content of <code>atom:content</code> is <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt">Language-Sensitive</a>.</content>[http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1633]
<content type="image/png"> iVBORw0KGgoA … TAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC </content>[http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1633]
<content src="image.png" type="image/png"/>[http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1633]
podcast specification[http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/specs.html] only allows RSS 2.0
enclosure
is used to point to the published itemsubmitted to iTunes