Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Metadata in RSS 2.0

As all good tutorials on the subject will tell you, metadata is data about data. In the case of RSS 2.0, this includes the name of the author of the feed, the date the channel was last updated, and so on. In Example 5-1, the bold code is the metadata. You can remove this data, and the feed itself will still both parse and be useful when displayed as HTML. Like a Hitchcock cameo, the metadata is in the background, silent, but meaningful to those who can see it.

Example 5-1. The metadata within an RSS 2.0 feed

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
  <title>RSS2.0 Example</title> 
  <link>http://www.oreilly.com/example/index.html</link> 
  <description>This is an example RSS2.0 feed</description> 
  <language>en-gb</language> 
               <copyright>Copyright 2004, Oreilly and Associates.</copyright>

               <managingEditor>[e-mail]</managingEditor> 
               <webMaster>[e-mail]</webMaster> 
               <pubDate>03 Apr 04 1500 GMT</pubDate>
               <lastBuildDate>03 Apr 04 1500 GMT</lastBuildDate>
               <docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss091</docs>
               <skipDays>
               <day>Monday</day>
               </skipDays>
               <skipHours>
               <hour>20</hour>
               </skipHours>
               <cloud domain="http://www.oreilly.com" port="80" path=
"/RPC2" 
registerProcedure="pleaseNotify" protocol="XML-RPC" /> <image> <title>RSS0.91 Example</title> <url>http://www.oreilly.com/example/images/logo.gif</url> <link>http://www.oreilly.com/example/index.html</link> <width>88</width> <height>31</height> <description>The World's Leading Technical Publisher</description> </image> <textInput> ...