Friday, 16 February 2007

How to Build an RSS File?

Jacques Noah has posted a new article in the Devshed web site. This time he focuses on the theoretical aspects of how to build an RSS file. For the uninitiated, he defines RSS as Really Simple Syndication. In simple terms he says, it is used to provide information about your web site to the world. There is not really any difference between an XML document and an RSS document; in fact most people would agree that RSS is an XML dialect. All RSS documents must conform to the XML specification, which is published on the W3C website. He informs you that there are several different versions of RSS formats.

Jacques says, there are many RSS variations available today, and most RSS readers can still read the earliest, version 0.91. The latest version is 2.0, and can also be read by most RSS readers. He informs you that there are two kinds of RSS documents. He calls them the simple kind and the enhanced kind. The enhanced version of an RSS document includes, in addition to the required elements some optional elements. He illustrates the optional elements with a table. The point to be noted he says is that all dates must conform to the RFC 822 specification as in the examples in the Table.

He further informs that all these specifications and rules were created because in the past, developers of RSS readers found that their readers could not read all RSS documents, because everybody created RSS documents as they wished. So a common approach to RSS document formatting was agreed upon, with a minimum standard to enable any RSS reader to read any RSS document.

The other part of the article deals with Required elements, Enhanced RSS document Structure and Aggregators.