RSS Basics - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 11

What about atom?
as you're looking for RSS feeds, you may read about of a different ile format called Atom . atom
does the same thing that RSS does, for the most part. there don't seem to be as many atom
feeds as RSS feeds, however. Most feed readers that support RSS also support atom, so don't
worry about the differences between the two formats.
Anatomy of an RSS Feed
I just described to you what a feed looks like, but let's consider an actual example.
You're used to HTML pages, which can look like pretty much anything, limited
only by the creativity of the designer. But RSS feeds are much more uniform.
Here's a part of an RSS feed, a summary of an article that was published
on the Book Standard (bookstandard.com). I'm showing you the code of it,
which looks very much like the source of an HTML page:
<item>
<title>Piracy Threat on the Horizon?</title>
<link>http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/
article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963039</link>
<description>The Book Standard, June 16, 2005. An overview of how
piracy is impacting American publishers, including this scary
little stat: “U.S. publishers lost an estimated $571 million to
the illegal activity in 2004, according to the International
Intellectual Property Alliance.” The article also raised the
question of why piracy wasn't more of an issue at the BEA, and how
outsourcing may be driving some of the problem.
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:22:20 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
How this information is displayed for you depends on your RSS reader.
Browsers all display RSS feeds a little bit diferently, just like they display
HTML pages a little bit diferently ( Figures 2.2 and 2.3 ).