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RSS FAQs - Atom Syndiation Format RFC4287 Reference Document

By: M. Nottingham, Ed. & R. Sayre, Ed.

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1.2.  Namespace and Version

   The XML Namespaces URI [W3C.REC-xml-names-19990114] for the XML data
   format described in this specification is:

   http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom

   For convenience, this data format may be referred to as "Atom 1.0".
   This specification uses "Atom" internally.

1.3.  Notational Conventions

   This specification describes conformance in terms of two artifacts:
   Atom Feed Documents and Atom Entry Documents.  Additionally, it
   places some requirements on Atom Processors.

   This specification uses the namespace prefix "atom:" for the
   Namespace URI identified in Section 1.2, above.  Note that the choice
   of namespace prefix is arbitrary and not semantically significant.

   Atom is specified using terms from the XML Infoset
   [W3C.REC-xml-infoset-20040204].  However, this specification uses a
   shorthand for two common terms: the phrase "Information Item" is
   omitted when naming Element Information Items and Attribute
   Information Items.  Therefore, when this specification uses the term
   "element," it is referring to an Element Information Item in Infoset
   terms.  Likewise, when it uses the term "attribute," it is referring
   to an Attribute Information Item.

   Some sections of this specification are illustrated with fragments of
   a non-normative RELAX NG Compact schema [RELAX-NG].  However, the
   text of this specification provides the definition of conformance.  A
   complete schema appears in Appendix B.

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, [RFC2119], as
   scoped to those conformance targets.

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2.  Atom Documents

   This specification describes two kinds of Atom Documents: Atom Feed
   Documents and Atom Entry Documents.

   An Atom Feed Document is a representation of an Atom feed, including
   metadata about the feed, and some or all of the entries associated
   with it.  Its root is the atom:feed element.

   An Atom Entry Document represents exactly one Atom entry, outside of
   the context of an Atom feed.  Its root is the atom:entry element.

   namespace atom = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
   start = atomFeed | atomEntry

   Both kinds of Atom Documents are specified in terms of the XML
   Information Set, serialized as XML 1.0 [W3C.REC-xml-20040204] and
   identified with the "application/atom+xml" media type.  Atom
   Documents MUST be well-formed XML.  This specification does not
   define a DTD for Atom Documents, and hence does not require them to
   be valid (in the sense used by XML).

   Atom allows the use of IRIs [RFC3987].  Every URI [RFC3986] is also
   an IRI, so a URI may be used wherever below an IRI is named.  There
   are two special considerations: (1) when an IRI that is not also a
   URI is given for dereferencing, it MUST be mapped to a URI using the
   steps in Section 3.1 of [RFC3987] and (2) when an IRI is serving as
   an atom:id value, it MUST NOT be so mapped, so that the comparison
   works as described in Section 4.2.6.1.

   Any element defined by this specification MAY have an xml:base
   attribute [W3C.REC-xmlbase-20010627].  When xml:base is used in an
   Atom Document, it serves the function described in section 5.1.1 of
   [RFC3986], establishing the base URI (or IRI) for resolving any
   relative references found within the effective scope of the xml:base
   attribute.

   Any element defined by this specification MAY have an xml:lang
   attribute, whose content indicates the natural language for the
   element and its descendents.  The language context is only
   significant for elements and attributes declared to be "Language-
   Sensitive" by this specification.  Requirements regarding the content
   and interpretation of xml:lang are specified in XML 1.0
   [W3C.REC-xml-20040204], Section 2.12.

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