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It is a format to share data, defined in the 1.0 version of XML. You can deliver information in this format et one can get this information, and information from other various sources, in this format. Information provided by a website in an XML file is called an RSS feed.Recent browsers can read directly RSS files, but a special RSS reader or aggregator may be used too.
Created by Netscape in 1999. The first version is 0.90. Followed by the 0.91 version that has been improved by the Userland company in 2000.In 2000 the version 1.0 based on RDF was created by O'Reilly and further maintained by the RSS-DEV group, and named RDF Site Summary.RSS 2.0 was defined by Dave Winer (previously worker at Userland) at Harvard University in 2002.This page is based on the Really Simple Syndication, 2.01 specification from Harvard.
To get information or news provided by websites in a format computers can process. To display it on a website or to read it yourself.And for the provider of the content, this allows it to send news about its site.
It is an XML file and the global container is the "RSS" tag for the 2.0 format.The file holds one channel at least, this is the website that provides the information.The channel provides some articles or data. These are web pages from the same site, or from other sites.
rss. The global container.channel. A distributing channel. It has several descriptive tags and holds one or several items.
<rss version="2.0"><channel> ? channel> rss>
<rss version="2.0"><channel> <title>Xul title> ? <link>http://www.xul.fr/ link> <description> description> <item> item> ? channel> rss>
Items of the channel
Each item tag must hold these tags:
And some optional info for this article
Building its personal RSS feed, step by step
At start, this is just a simple text file, created with any text editor. But an XML editor is more convenient. (see at the "software" page). The name may be, for example: "feed.xml".The overall structure is as that:
Define the source, by the channel tag
The channel will be the same for all your RSS feeds. These tags are required:- title: the title of your website, may be the one in the title tag of the home page.- link: the URL of your website: example: http://www.xul.fr- description: description of your website, about 200 characters, this may be the text assigned to the content attribute of the description tag, in the head section of the home page.
This is optional. Design a small image (88x31 for example) in a common format (gif, jpg, png) and put in into the same directory that the RSS file.The "image" tag is a sub-element of the channel tag- url is the address of the image itself.- link is the address of the page displayed when one clicks on the image.
Now, we will add a web page to display an information. This is an "item" tag, a sub-element of channel, and this components are required:- title: the title of the article.- link: the URL of the page.- description: a summary of the article, about 200 characters.
More items may be added to this channel.
Put the feed.xml file into your website, among other web pages.
You may use this online RSS feed validator.
You may use this online RSS feed validator.
This is accomplished by adding an RSS button on the home page. A click on the button should display the XML file you have created
To publish further articles, you have just to add items, and remove older ones to keep the number of articles constan
You have created an RSS feed and it is now stored at root of your website. You must let browsers knowing the existence of this file and its location, when they enter and display the home page (or any other page if you want). Firefox will display the feed icon into the URL field, Internet Explorer on the bar of commands.To activate them, insert the following line into the source code of the page, anywhere inside the section:
Replace the URL by your domain name with the path and filename of your RSS feed.
And if the file is in the atom format, replace rss+xml by atom+xml.
Dublin Core and RSS: example in RSS 1.0 (RDF)
On the RDF, page, the Dublin Core format has been evoked, about describing work of authors and other documents.
RSS 1.0 version, based upon RDF is of course the one used by Dublin Core for RSS feed.
The difference with RSS 2.0 is in the use of RDF, that first describes the structure and then elements of the structure.


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