Working with RSS

RSS is a widely used XML-based standard, used to exchange information between applications on the Internet. One of the great advantages of XML is that it is plain text, thus easily read by any application. RSS feeds can be viewed as plain text files, but it doesn’t make much sense to use them like that, as they are meant to be read by specialized software that generates web content based on their data.

While RSS is not the only standard for expressing feeds as XML, we’ve chosen to use this format in the case study because it’s very widely used. In order to better understand RSS, we need to see what lies underneath the name; the RSS document structure, that is.

The RSS Document Structure

The first version of RSS was created in 1999. This is known as version 0.9. Since then it has evolved to the current 2.0.1 version, which has been frozen by the development community, as future development is expected to be done under a different name.

A typical RSS feed might look like this...