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What Is RSS
by Mark Pilgrim | Pages: 1, 2

Despite being RDF/XML, RSS 1.0 is structurally similar to previous versions of RSS -- similar enough that we can simply treat it as XML and write a single function to extract information out of either an RSS 0.91 or RSS 1.0 feed. However, there are some significant differences that our code will need to be aware of:

What are Syndication Feeds

  1. The root element is rdf:RDF instead of rss. We'll either need to handle both explicitly or just ignore the name of the root element altogether and blindly look for useful information inside it.

  2. RSS 1.0 uses namespaces extensively. The RSS 1.0 namespace is http://purl.org/rss/1.0/, and it's defined as the default namespace. The feed also uses http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# for the RDF-specific elements (which we'll simply be ignoring for our purposes) and http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ (Dublin Core) for the additional metadata of article authors and publishing dates.

    We can go in one of two ways here: if we don't have a namespace-aware XML parser, we can blindly assume that the feed uses the standard prefixes and default namespace and look for item elements and dc:creator elements within them. This will actually work in a large number of real-world cases; most RSS feeds use the default namespace and the same prefixes for common modules like Dublin Core. This is a horrible hack, though. There's no guarantee that a feed won't use a different prefix for a namespace (which would be perfectly valid XML and RDF). If or when it does, we'll miss it.

    If we have a namespace-aware XML parser at our disposal, we can construct a more elegant solution that handles both RSS 0.91 and 1.0 feeds. We can look for items in no namespace; if that fails, we can look for items in the RSS 1.0 namespace. (Not shown, but RSS 0.90 feeds also use a namespace, but not the same one as RSS 1.0. So what we really need is a list of namespaces to search.)

  3. Less obvious but still important, the item elements are outside the channel element. (In RSS 0.91, the item elements were inside the channel. In RSS 0.90, they were outside; in RSS 2.0, they're inside. Whee.) So we can't be picky about where we look for items.

  4. Finally, you'll notice there is an extra items element within the channel. It's only useful to RDF parsers, and we're going to ignore it and assume that the order of the items within the RSS feed is given by their order of the item elements.

But what about RSS 2.0? Luckily, once we've written code to handle RSS 0.91 and 1.0, RSS 2.0 is a piece of cake. Here's the RSS 2.0 version of the same feed:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
  <channel>
    <title>XML.com</title>
    <link>http://www.xml.com/</link>
    <description>XML.com features a rich mix of information and services for the XML community.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <item>
      <title>Normalizing XML, Part 2</title>
      <link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/normalizing.html</link>
      <description>In this second and final look at applying relational normalization techniques to W3C XML Schema data modeling, Will Provost discusses when not to normalize, the scope of uniqueness and the fourth and fifth normal forms.</description>
      <dc:creator>Will Provost</dc:creator>
      <dc:date>2002-12-04</dc:date>    
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>The .NET Schema Object Model</title>
      <link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/som.html</link>
      <description>Priya Lakshminarayanan describes in detail the use of the .NET Schema Object Model for programmatic manipulation of W3C XML Schemas.</description>
      <dc:creator>Priya Lakshminarayanan</dc:creator>
      <dc:date>2002-12-04</dc:date>    
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>SVG's Past and Promising Future</title>
      <link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/svg.html</link>
      <description>In this month's SVG column, Antoine Quint looks back at SVG's journey through 2002 and looks forward to 2003.</description>
      <dc:creator>Antoine Quint</dc:creator>
      <dc:date>2002-12-04</dc:date>    
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

As this example shows, RSS 2.0 uses namespaces like RSS 1.0, but it's not RDF. Like RSS 0.91, there is no default namespace and items are back inside the channel. If our code is liberal enough to handle the differences between RSS 0.91 and 1.0, RSS 2.0 should not present any additional wrinkles.

How can I read RSS?

Now let's get down to actually reading these sample RSS feeds from Python. The first thing we'll need to do is download some RSS feeds. This is simple in Python; most distributions come with both a URL retrieval library and an XML parser. (Note to Mac OS X 10.2 users: your copy of Python does not come with an XML parser; you will need to install PyXML first.)

from xml.dom import minidom
import urllib

def load(rssURL):
  return minidom.parse(urllib.urlopen(rssURL))

This takes the URL of an RSS feed and returns a parsed representation of the DOM, as native Python objects.

The next bit is the tricky part. To compensate for the differences in RSS formats, we'll need a function that searches for specific elements in any number of namespaces. Python's XML library includes a getElementsByTagNameNS which takes a namespace and a tag name, so we'll use that to make our code general enough to handle RSS 0.9x/2.0 (which has no default namespace), RSS 1.0 and even RSS 0.90. This function will find all elements with a given name, anywhere within a node. That's a good thing; it means that we can search for item elements within the root node and always find them, whether they are inside or outside the channel element.

DEFAULT_NAMESPACES = \
  (None, # RSS 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 2.0
  'http://purl.org/rss/1.0/', # RSS 1.0
  'http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/' # RSS 0.90
  )

def getElementsByTagName(node, tagName, possibleNamespaces=DEFAULT_NAMESPACES):
  for namespace in possibleNamespaces:
    children = node.getElementsByTagNameNS(namespace, tagName)
    if len(children): return children
  return []

Finally, we need two utility functions to make our lives easier. First, our getElementsByTagName function will return a list of elements, but most of the time we know there's only going to be one. An item only has one title, one link, one description, and so on. We'll define a first function that returns the first element of a given name (again, searching across several different namespaces). Second, Python's XML libraries are great at parsing an XML document into nodes, but not that helpful at putting the data back together again. We'll define a textOf function that returns the entire text of a particular XML element.

def first(node, tagName, possibleNamespaces=DEFAULT_NAMESPACES):
  children = getElementsByTagName(node, tagName, possibleNamespaces)
  return len(children) and children[0] or None

def textOf(node):
  return node and "".join([child.data for child in node.childNodes]) or ""

That's it. The actual parsing is easy. We'll take a URL on the command line, download it, parse it, get the list of items, and then get some useful information from each item:

DUBLIN_CORE = ('http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/',)

if __name__ == '__main__':
  import sys
  rssDocument = load(sys.argv[1])
  for item in getElementsByTagName(rssDocument, 'item'):
    print 'title:', textOf(first(item, 'title'))
    print 'link:', textOf(first(item, 'link'))
    print 'description:', textOf(first(item, 'description'))
    print 'date:', textOf(first(item, 'date', DUBLIN_CORE))
    print 'author:', textOf(first(item, 'creator', DUBLIN_CORE))
    print

Running it with our sample RSS 0.91 feed prints only title, link, and description (since the feed didn't include any other information on dates or authors):

$ python rss1.py http://www.xml.com/2002/12/18/examples/rss091.xml.txt
title: Normalizing XML, Part 2
link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/normalizing.html
description: In this second and final look at applying relational normalization techniques to W3C XML Schema data modeling, Will Provost discusses when not to normalize, the scope of uniqueness and the fourth and fifth normal forms.
date:
author:

title: The .NET Schema Object Model
link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/som.html
description: Priya Lakshminarayanan describes in detail the use of the .NET Schema Object Model for programmatic manipulation of W3C XML Schemas.
date:
author:

title: SVG's Past and Promising Future
link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/svg.html
description: In this month's SVG column, Antoine Quint looks back at SVG's journey through 2002 and looks forward to 2003.
date:
author:

For both the sample RSS 1.0 feed and sample RSS 2.0 feed, we also get dates and authors for each item. We reuse our custom getElementsByTagName function, but pass in the Dublin Core namespace and appropriate tag name. We could reuse this same function to extract information from any of the basic RSS modules. (There are a few advanced modules specific to RSS 1.0 that would require a full RDF parser, but they are not widely deployed in public RSS feeds.)

Here's the output against our sample RSS 1.0 feed:

$ python rss1.py http://www.xml.com/2002/12/18/examples/rss10.xml.txt
title: Normalizing XML, Part 2
link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/normalizing.html
description: In this second and final look at applying relational normalization techniques to W3C XML Schema data modeling, Will Provost discusses when not to normalize, the scope of uniqueness and the fourth and fifth normal forms.
date: 2002-12-04
author: Will Provost

title: The .NET Schema Object Model
link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/som.html
description: Priya Lakshminarayanan describes in detail the use of the .NET Schema Object Model for programmatic manipulation of W3C XML Schemas.
date: 2002-12-04
author: Priya Lakshminarayanan

title: SVG's Past and Promising Future
link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/svg.html
description: In this month's SVG column, Antoine Quint looks back at SVG's journey through 2002 and looks forward to 2003.
date: 2002-12-04
author: Antoine Quint

Running against our sample RSS 2.0 feed produces the same results.

This technique will handle about 90% of the RSS feeds out there; the rest are ill-formed in a variety of interesting ways, mostly caused by non-XML-aware publishing tools building feeds out of templates and not respecting basic XML well-formedness rules. Next month we'll tackle the thorny problem of how to handle RSS feeds that are almost, but not quite, well-formed XML.

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  • blog post on RSS
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  • RSS Spider or Converter ????
    2008-03-07 21:08:09 Mavricky [Reply]

    Is there anyway a website information that isn't RSS be converted and streamed to your own website via RSS. Like a conversion code or spider?

  • It's Cool this RSS feeds
    2007-08-15 14:13:28 worldmove [Reply]

    It's Cool this RSS feeds http://www.movingcompanies.co.il
    http://www.locksmithsecurityservices.com

    • It's Cool this RSS feeds
      2008-10-25 01:03:30 sgambella [Reply]

      Good clear article. The use of RSS feeds has expanded massively and it needs to be considered an essential part of any full website stategy.


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  • Whats RSS
    2006-10-21 01:41:02 teddy4050 [Reply]

    Even after reading the article I still don't understand RSS. Can't someone put in in "Plain words"

    • Whats RSS
      2007-10-06 00:19:31 eduology [Reply]

      RSS in simple terms is like email or similar to a mailing list. You can get information straight to your desktop. You choose what info that you do want and can read it in your own time.


      The best part about RSS is you have full control of it and can turn it off at any moment you wnat by removing the feed from your RSS reader.


      You can read more about it at our site...


      Preston http://www.rssprotocol.com (http://www.rssprotocol.com)

    • Whats RSS
      2007-02-02 21:12:46 nhklein [Reply]

      But I could not find what "R S S" stands for - funny for such a long article not to explain this.

  • rss wiki
    2006-08-02 17:13:26 Tommahawk [Reply]

    here is an rss generator at http://www.rss-wiki.com

  • RSS Feed Distribution
    2006-06-11 08:56:06 Saleem11 [Reply]

    I enjoyed the article .. some parts a bit too techi, but generally a good read. My question is that now that I have created a couple of feeds, how can I distribute these around the web. What is the best way of doing this ... are there any sites where I can publish these feeds ...



    http://www.shopitonline.co.uk/EasternEuropeTravelNewsFeed.xml





  • RSS brought to life
    2006-04-06 14:29:05 messageticker-man [Reply]

    What you really need in my opinion is Messageticker to be able to incorporate multiple RSS feeds into an easily managable and controlled arena for a corporate company. By deciding who sees what informatin from waht RSS / RDF feed baed on a either anmaed user, or a client login, targeted, controlled information can be directed to people and departments that need it (push technology). See www.messageticker.com

  • RSS in Medical Research
    2006-02-19 01:16:39 DoctorWho [Reply]

    I have found RSS to be extremely useful for doctors and those in a medical profession, as doctors have very little time yet need to be constantly up to date with the latest medical news and developments in medicine.


    I believe that its widespread use amongst medics will bring about giant leaps forward in medicine and healthcare world-wide. Does anyone else share the same enthusiasm? What do you use RSS for?


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  • Current version of RSS?
    2005-12-01 07:49:30 jimUK [Reply]

    I am currently doing a university project on RSS. I am very new to it and having read this article understand alot more about it. The only thing I am left wondering is what the correct version of RSS to be using is? Or is the choice up to you?

    • Current version of RSS?
      2007-10-06 00:23:23 eduology [Reply]

      The current version is 2.0 yes but the industry is so fragmented that it is hard to keep up with what the RSS readers are reading and what the RSS builders are building. That is why we started our site.


      Preston - [url=http://www.rssprotocol.com RSS Info[/url]

  • Scroll Speed
    2005-11-13 03:35:45 reimera [Reply]

    How can I change the scroll speed of the rss feed?

  • RSS 1.1 ?
    2005-07-28 09:42:26 erob [Reply]

    Hi,


    I believe the author must have forgot RSS 1.1..


    Here is the url: http://inamidst.com/rss1.1/




  • A doubt about how RSS client should work
    2005-04-11 06:53:49 insac [Reply]

    I don't know if it's just a doubt of mine, but I haven't seen in the specs a clear explanation about how a RSS reader should understand if a new "event" has been added to the feed.


    Should it read all the feed, parse it and compare the last pubDate with the one locally stored? Or should it use the Http Header cache control (last-modified). Or it should test the first pubdate it finds (hypothesis.. the newest update are the first in the feed)? Or it should compare all the feed with the stored copy?


    My doubt derives from the fact that I see feeds that behave strangely (always marked as updated or never marked also if it has been updated) with the FeedReader I installed and i can't decide if the problem is the feed or the client.


    If that's not the place to ask such a question, can someone direct me to the right place?


    Thanks,
    Fabio

  • Your article helped me -
    2005-03-06 08:25:14 katykoot [Reply]

    I just want to make sure I did it right. I am hoping that my feed.rss will be picked up by news agencies and syndicated. Can you check it for me...and by looking at this - is this the correct way to be doing a press release...by rss? versus prweb.com?


    http://www.amethystlive.com/feed.rss

  • My Company doesn't want RSS
    2004-04-07 08:47:00 Raleigh Swick [Reply]

    After trying to get my company to get RSS feeds.... their reply:


    >> However, we are holding off on deploying them in a widespread fashion
    >> while we craft a general strategy for syndication and mobility. Though
    >> RSS feeds may be useful in news aggregators, and could increase page
    >> views to articles, the risk is that they may actually reduce page
    >> views to our own index pages, which carry display advertising that RSS
    >> inherently cannot.


    How can I argue this? What to say?

    • My Company doesn't want RSS
      2004-08-07 20:09:08 Thogek [Reply]

      Note that an RSS feed often contains only the opening paragraph (or short teaser/summary) of each posted article (or announcement or whatever). The bulk of the article is generally kept on the Web site, the URL for which is included in the RSS feed, so that users who are interested can click through and read the whole thing. So, your RSS feed is basically another way for users to subscribe to announcements of new articles, features, etc., for which they still have to come to your site, and view your pages (and ads) in order to view the whole article. (Kinda like direct-emailing of new article announcements, but easier.)

      • My Company doesn't want RSS
        2005-04-18 17:55:27 ogaga [Reply]

        my company considers the initiative of RSS worthwhile but frowns at the complexity of its nature. is there anyway it can be simplified for easy usage because i must confess its giving me a lot of trouble?

    • My Company doesn't want RSS
      2004-06-11 09:09:38 prakashnambiar [Reply]

      Hey , you can deliver an Advt with the image/logo of your rss feed, stil you can use the comments tag !!!

  • Please don't break XML!
    2003-01-03 01:35:35 Henri Sivonen [Reply]

    Using the namespace prefixes instead of proper namespace processing is dirty. Getting a namespace-aware XML parser is not that hard. Please don't break namespaces by using prefix-based guessing.


    Even more worrying is the last sentence: "Next month we'll tackle the thorny problem of how to handle RSS feeds that are almost, but not quite, well-formed XML."


    What's there to tackle? The only correct way to handle ill-formed XML is to firmly reject it. Please enforce the XML well-formedness requirements in order to protect XML from degenerating into tag soup.

    • Please don't break XML!
      2005-01-19 04:20:03 Looking_past_XML [Reply]

      Oh my freakin' god, XML is not a sacred standard, shit happens, the offical W3C docs encourage browser/user-agent creators to attempt to properly render imperfect html/xhtml.


      The spirit of RFC's and protocols that has made the internet work(able) is:
      "Be liberal in in what you accept and conservative in what you send" and it's variations by Jon Postel.


      Also, TOG et al would probably assail a system that was so anal and rigid and non-resilient (and they would say lazy) that it couldn't route around some minor formatting transgressions and give the user 50%, 80% or whatever percent of the feed that it could decipher.
      But this brings up the elephant that no one is allowed to talk about - XML and it's main parsers are extremely brittle and complex.


      Flame on...

      • Please don't break XML!
        2005-05-29 14:42:42 bwoodring [Reply]

        Jeez... I just re-read your posts and found more garbage.


        "The spirit of RFC's and protocols that has made the internet work(able) is: "Be liberal in in what you accept and conservative in what you send" and it's variations by Jon Postel."


        Wow. You completely mis-interpreted that one. Being liberal in what you accept does not mean you have to accept corrupt data. It simply means you have to fail gracefully. Trying to interpret the meaning of corrupted XML documents is dangerously stupid. Instead of just letting both the consumer and producer know that something is wrong, you've risked propogating a bug or possibly corrupting the meaning of data.


        • Please don't break XML!
          2005-06-27 05:30:36 lbff [Reply]

          Couldn't agree with you more.


          Any XML that is impropertly syntacizated should be rejected. If we are to maintain the purity of XML, such transgressions should never be permitted. Indeed, the offenders of The Standard should punished, if not purged. Any lesser response would encourage the dilution of The Master Protocol.


          In fact, there should be a web application that immediately punishes, through, say, electrical shock, any deviations in XML format in a document and, if the non-conforming coder insists on publishing such to the web -- then, well, there is no saving the author and he/she should be abended and the document DES-wiped, before he can do any further damage to the structure of the internet.

      • Please don't break XML!
        2005-01-19 04:33:16 Looking_past_XML [Reply]

        Since people may not get the "TOG" reference:
        TOG - usability expert that puts much more responsibility on the system creators for making systems that "Just Work++" than many programmers would like, after reading too much of his stuff start thinking "Wow, programs should do a lot better job for the user in many cases" http://www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostPersistentBugs.html

        • You've missed the whole point
          2005-05-29 14:37:52 bwoodring [Reply]

          You've said so many things that are simply wrong or demonstrate that you don't know what you're talking about that I'm not sure where to begin.


          XML was designed to be strictly parsed. It is a *requirement* that all XML documents be properly formed. This is part of the standard, look it up. Any program that parses malformed XML documents is broken. That's a bug, not a feature. All valid XML parsers MUST reject a corrupted file. If a TCP/IP packet is corrupted, does your router try to fix it? No, it drops it a requests a resend. XML is a format predominantly for machine intercommunication, it is NOT LIKE HTML. It is unacceptable for an XML document to be improperly formed. What the hell is the receiving computer supposed to do with it? Guess what was intended? The problem is, you don't understand that (chorus) XML IS NOT LIKE HTML. XML marks the *meaning* of data, how in hell do you intend to deal with corruption? Allowing mal-formed XML documents would be the equivalent of lossy-compressing all your business documents, that is, colossally bone-headed.


          HTML can be loosely interpreted, because it's just formatting. XML must be strictly interpreted because it's information.

    • Please don't break XML!
      2005-01-11 05:27:50 despil [Reply]

      I absolutely agree.


      What is the sense in making standards if we throw them out the window so easily?


      Either don't make standards or use them.
      There is no third way.

  • RDF makes life difficult
    2002-12-19 12:39:02 Mario Diana [Reply]

    If there is some reason that sites wish to use RDF, they ought to include a XSL transformation of the document to RSS. Is that really so difficult?


    I was writing a Web service to gather an RSS feed from a client and return transformed HTML. When I ran into RDF, I was completely thrown. (Okay, maybe I live under a rock.)


    RDF is for machines; RSS is far more human-friendly. It's a pain to have to deal with it if you're not interested in its features.

    • RDF makes life difficult
      2004-09-24 13:06:41 kes [Reply]

      Can you tell me more about the project you are working on. It sounds really interesting...and I would love to learn more. thanks-

  • So that's what it is ;-)
    2002-12-19 11:59:51 Danny Ayers [Reply]

    Good piece, refreshingly practical. Also a refreshingly balanced comparison between the different formats, though (predictable quibble) the recommendation of RSS 2.0 for "general-purpose, metadata-rich syndication" seems a little strange when RSS 1.0-based feeds can be much more general purpose and metadata rich, thanks to RDF.