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RSS FAQs - Atom Feed File Structure and Elements

By: FYIcenter.com

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  • <rights> - Specifying the information about the copyrights for this feed. A feed element may have zero or one rights sub-element.
  • <subtitle> - Specifying a description or a subtitle for this feed. A feed element may have zero or one subtitle sub-element.
  • <title> - Specifying a title for this feed. A feed element must have exactly one title sub-element.
  • <updated> - Specifying a time stamp of when this feed was updated. A feed element must have exactly one updated sub-element.
  • <entry> - Specifying an entry of a feed. A feed element must have one or more entry sub-elements.

How To Generate a Feed title Element?

The <title> element is a required sub-element of the <feed> element. The title element should contain a short but human readable title of the feed document. You should follow the same rules on Web page title elements to generate your Atom feed title elements.

One strategy is to use the same title as the Web page that your Atom feed is based on. For example, if your Web site provides a Web page for the most popular FAQ entries for Webmasters. That Web page has a title called: "The Most Popular FAQ Entries for Webmasters". Now you want to generate an Atom feed for that Web page. Obviously, you should the same title as that page:

 <title>The Most Popular FAQ Entries for Webmasters</title>

How To Generate a Feed subtitle Element?

The <subtitle> element is not a required sub-element of the <feed> element. But it is strongly recommended that you provide a subtitle element for each of your feed documents. You should follow the same rules on Web page description meta elements to generate your Atom feed subtitle elements.

One strategy is to use the same value of the description meta element as the Web page that your Atom feed is based on. For example, if your Web site provides a Web page for the most popular FAQ entries for Webmasters. That Web page has the following description meta element: 

 <meta name="description" content="The top 10 popular 
  entries of this week on our comprehensive collection 
  of Webmaster FAQs."/>

Now you want to generate an Atom feed for that Web page. Obviously, you should borrow value from the description meta element of that page:

 <title>The Most Popular FAQ Entries for Webmasters</title>
 <subtitle>The top 10 popular 
  entries of this week on our comprehensive collection 
  of Webmaster FAQs."</subtitle>

How To Generate a Feed link Element?

The <link> element is not a required sub-element of the <feed> element. But it is strongly recommended that you provide a link element with rel="self" for each of your feed documents.

The rule for feed link element is simple. It needs two attributes:

  • rel="self" - Indicating that this link is providing the URL of this feed document itself.
  • href="urlOfThisFeed" - Specifying the URL of this feed document.

For example, if you have a feed document located at http://dev.fyicenter.com/atom.xml, you should generate a feed link element like this:

 <link rel="self" href="http://dev.fyicenter.com/atom.xml"/>

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