Using RSS

Aims Of This Exercise

This exercise is intended for use in a hands-on session. The aim of the exercise is to gain an understanding of the role of RSS in providing news feeds by viewing an RSS News Feed and examing the RSS file.

3.1 Using an RSS News Feed

Go to the W3C Web site at the URL <http://www.w3c.org/>. Notice the news information provide in the middle column).

Go to UKOLN’s RSS parser at the URL <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/>. Then in the Channels Directory section find the information for The World Wide Web Consortium and then click on the view option.

Notice how this news information is the same as that provided on the W3C home page, but is included on the UKOLN Web site with UKOLN’s logo and URL.

3.2 Viewing An RSS News Feed (I)

Return to UKOLN’s RSS channel editor and directory at the URL <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/>.

In the Channels Directory section find the information for The World Wide Web Consortium and select the source option.

Notice that, after the RDF namespace declarations, the RSS file contains <item>, <description>, <title> and <link> tags which correspond to the individual news feeds.

Go to the URL <http://w.moreover.com/dev/xml/> and select the link to “examples of how headlines appear in several flavors of XML” near the bottom of the page. Compare the Moreover XML DTD for newsfeed with Netscape’s RSS (version 0.9) equivalent.

3.3 Viewing An RSS News Feed (II)

Go to ILRT’s RSS parser at the URL <http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rss/>.

Find the news feed for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and select the In a box option.

Scroll down the page and view the news feed. See how it comapres with the view you have seen previously.