Reading and Writing RSS Feeds - Java 6 - page 508

In line 12 of Listing 19.1, the guid element includes an isPermaLink attribute with a
value of “false” . This indicates that the element's value,
“ tag:cadenhead.org,2007:weblog.3132 ”, is not a permalink , the URL at which the
item can be loaded in a browser.

XML also supports elements defined by a single tag rather than a pair of tags. The tag
begins with a “<” character followed by the name of the tag and ends with the “/>” char-
acters. The RSS file includes an enclosure element in lines 13-14 that describes an
MP3 audio file associated with the item.

XML encourages the creation of data that's understandable and usable even if the user
doesn't have the program that created it and cannot find any documentation that
describes it.

The purpose of the RSS file in Listing 19.1 can be understood, for the most part, simply
by looking at it. Each item represents a web page that has been updated recently.

Publishing new site content over RSS and a similar format, Atom,
has become one of the best ways to build readership on the Web.
Thousands of people subscribe to RSS files, which are called
feeds, using reader software such as Google Reader, Bloglines,
and My Yahoo.
Rogers Cadenhead, the lead author of this topic, is the current
chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, the group that publishes the
RSS 2.0 specification. For more information on the format, visit
the board's site at http://www.rssboard.org or subscribe to its
RSS feed at http://www.rssboard.org/rss-feed.

TIP

Data that follows XML's formatting rules is said to be well-formed . Any software that
can work with XML reads and writes well-formed XML data.

By insisting on well-formed markup, XML simplifies the task of
writing programs that work with the data. RSS makes website
updates available in a form that's easily processed by software.
The RSS feed for Workbench at http://www.cadenhead.org/work-
bench/rss, published by one of this topic's authors, has two dis-
tinct audiences: humans reading the blog through their preferred
RSS reader and computers that do something with this data, such
as Technorati, which offers a searchable database of site updates,
links between different blogs, and categorization. To see how
Technorati uses that RSS feed, visit http://technorati.com/
blogs/cadenhead.org/workbench .

NOTE