Different Structure of RSS Feed?

HTML & CSS
1

RSS feeds usually have a tag structure like this:

<rss version=“2.0”>
<channel>
<item>
<title>Some title…</title>
<description>Some description…</description>
<link>www.somelink.com</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:01:09 AM PST</pubDate>
</item>
…
…

But when I looked at source code of Sitepoint’s RSS feeds, I found a new type of tag structure:

<feed>
<entry>
<title>Some title…</title>
<link rel=“alternate” type=“text/html” href=“www.somelink.com”/>
<author>
<name>Luke Moulton</name>
</author>
<id>www.somelink.com</id>
<summary>Some description…</summary>
<updated>2010-02-03T03:09:10+00:00</updated>
</entry>
…
…

Now why we have 2 different types of XML structure for RSS feeds? What is the significance of both structures and which structure is better?

Thank you for your help.

2

It’s because the second isn’t an RSS feed… it’s an Atom feed.

The main difference between RSS and Atom (which are competing formats like SVG / VML or JavaScript / VBScript) is that RSS 2.0 (the current version) is more compact but limited than Atom. Atom has a wider range of elements, better support for RDFa DCMI meta-data and I ultimately prefer it. However for the benefit of being consistent, every website should technically make use of BOTH RSS and Atom (as their both widely supported and people have their own preference). :slight_smile:

3

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the valuable information. So I’ll need to consider both “Atom” and “RSS” feeds and use 2 different parsing scripts to display these on my website.

Thanks again.