Atom Feeds - Metadata and Entries

Atom feeds are simply a collection of entries. The simplicity of Atom feeds is one of the things that makes Atom so great. But, by making use of XML extensibility, Atom feeds are much more powerful then their predecessor... RSS feeds. Atom Feeds can handle complex content and yet remain very simple and elegant on their own. They are not limited to just text, they may contain images, video, text, html, and more all at once!

Take a look at this Feed skeleton. The example is broken down into detail down below, showing both simple and more advanced concepts of a Feed for a fake blog. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

  <!-- Feed Details -->
  <title type="text>Blog Title</title>
  <author> ... </author>

  <!-- First Entry -->
  <entry>
    ...
  </entry>

  <!-- Second Entry -->
  <entry>
    ...
  </entry>

</feed>
Atom's XML Namespace

For Atom feeds the root most element is the <feed> tag. That tag points to the http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom namespace. This is one of the most important parts of an Atom feed and XML in general. By defining multiple xmlns XML namespaces you can use tags from different namespaces within your Atom Feed thereby extending Atom for enhanced functionality.

I suggest that you take a look at the Atom Syndication Format specification to learn more about the individual tags in more detail. The most common tags are <content>, <author>, <title>, <id>, <link>, and probably most importantly the <entry> tag, which may itself incorporate all of the previously mentioned tags!

Feed Details

Inside an Atom Feed, before any <entry> tags, will be a bunch of data that describe the feed itself. This is metadata describing the feed and is meant to be human readable and straightforward. It is simple to understand and implement. The Atom Syndication Specification states that this area must contain the following:

  1. An <id> tag - a unique identifier like a URL

  2. An <updated> tag - a recently updated timestamp

  3. A <title> tag - a human readable title

  4. 0 or more <author> tags - to indicate the feeds authors

  5. 0 or more <contributor> tags - similar to authors

  6. 0 or more <category> tags - to convey some information

  7. 0 or more <link> tags - for other resources/URLs

  8. And optional <generator>, <icon>, <logo>, <rights>, and <subtitle> tags for extra information and details for the feed.

Each element is explained in detail under the atom:feed tag's documentation. Here is an example for a fake blog. Remember the required items are green and optional items are blue. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

  <!-- Feed Details -->
  <title type="text">Overused Moleskin</title>
  <updated>2008-03-05T12:29:29Z</updated>
  <id>tag:example.org,2003:3</id>
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/html"
        href="http://example.org/"/>
  <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml"
        href="http://example.org/feed.atom"/>
  <subtitle type="html">
    My &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; stories.
  </subtitle>
  <rights>Copyright (c) 2008, Joseph Pecoraro</rights>
  <author>
    <name>Joseph Pecoraro</name>
  </author>
What Does it Mean?

  1. The blog is titled Overused Moleskin

  2. It is found at http://example.org/

  3. Was last updated 2008-03-05

  4. Written and copyrighted by Joseph Pecoraro

  5. It likely contains Joe's short stories

There is really nothing to it! Everything is human readable. You can see in the <subtitle> tag that its inner content can be defined in a number of extensible ways. In the case of the <subtitle> tag its values can be "Text Content" meaning text, html, or xhtml, but you will see later with the <entry>'s <content> element, the data can be far different.

Read on for Entries

A feed is not complete without <entry> elements. Go ahead to the next page for information regarding this key Atom element.