The Structure Of An Atom Feed
Explore the structure of an Atom feed, a standardized XML format for syndicating frequently updated web content. Learn about the root element, namespace, feed metadata, and how articles include titles, authors, links, unique IDs, dates, categories, and summaries for clear, uniform data representation.
We'll cover the following...
Think of a weblog, or in fact any website with frequently updated content, like CNN.com. The site itself has a title (“CNN.com”), a subtitle (“Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment & Video News”), a last-updated date (“updated 12:43 p.m. EDT, Sat May 16, 2009”), and a list of articles posted at different times. Each article also has a title, a first-published date (and maybe also a last-updated date, if they published a correction or fixed a typo), and a unique URL.
The Atom syndication format is designed to capture all of this information in a standard format. My weblog and CNN.com are wildly different in design, scope, and audience, but they both have the same basic structure. CNN.com has a title; my blog has a title. CNN.com publishes ...