Java Reference
In-Depth Information
C
HAPTER
12: W
ORKING
WITH
RSS F
EEDS
• Understanding RSS
• Differences Between RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0
• Parsing RSS
• Find the RSS Link Tag
RSS feeds provide a means for web sites to communicate links to their newest content.
Users who are interested in particular web sites can instruct their browsers, and other soft-
ware, to follow the RSS feeds from that site. When new content is posted to the feed, the user
will know about it.
RSS is communicated using the HTTP protocol and the “file format” used for RSS is XML
based. Because of these two features, it is easy to add RSS support to a bot. RSS data can be
valuable to bots that monitor web sites. In this chapter, you will be shown how to access RSS
with Java.
RSS is an acronym which can stand for several different things. These different mean-
ings are summarized here:
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
To the end user, all versions of RSS operate similarly. In the next section, we will see how
users typically use RSS.
Using RSS with a Web Browser
Most modern web browsers include support for RSS. An RSS feed is usually implement-
ed as a sort of dynamic bookmark in most web browsers. Firefox alerts you to the presence
of RSS with a simple icon displayed on the URL line. If you access the following URL, you will
see an RSS icon in Firefox.
http://www.httprecipes.com/
