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Atom Explained| Category | | | Summary | | | Body | Atom Explained
Atom is a content syndication format. In its principle, it is similar
to RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary). This means
that Atom is used for giving out periodic feeds about your website
update. The technical term for this is 'metadata', which is nothing but
data about data. The file format for doing so is XML (Extensible Markup
Language). The feeds can be read by any feed reader supporting Atom
like RSSOwl.
Here is an example of a typical Atom feed,
<tt>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<title>Rae's
Feed</title><br>
<link href="http://www.cauniversity.org/"/>
<updated>2005-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Rae</name>
</author>
<id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93C-0003939e0af6</id>
<entry>
<title>Atom
Explained</title>
<link
href="http://www.cauniversity.org/atomKB"/>
<id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
<updated>2005-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
<summary>A brief
explaination of Atom</summary>
</entry>
</feed>
</tt>
Now I'll start the explaination of the code. The first line dictates
that the document conforms to the XML 1.0 Standard. The next line
specifies the XML Namespace, which in this case is the Atom 1.0
Specification. The feed actually consists of the metadata and further
information in the entries. The '>title<' tag specifies
the human readable title of the feed, which in this case is 'Rae's
Feed'. Note that this should not be left blank. The
'<link>' tag refers to the associated website while the
'<updated>' tag refers to the date and time when the feed
was last updated in a significant way.
Next comes the author tag which specifies the author of the feed. It is
to be noted that a feed may have multiple authors. Also, A feed must
contain at least one author element unless all of the entry elements
contain at least one author element. You can also add tags like e-mail
of an author under the author parent tag. The '<id>' tag
identifies the feed by using a uniquely assigned URI. This tag can also
hold a domain name, if you own one.
We shall now look at the '<entry>' tag. Every post has
its own entry tag. Thus, it is needless to state that the feed can have
multiple entry tags. The title, link, id and updated tags are pretty
much the same, excepting the fact that they now stand for a single
entry rather than the whole feed. The interesting tag to note here is
'<summary>', which contains a brief abstract about the
entry in question. If you want to include all the content in the entry
itself, skip the summary tag, and use the '<content>'
tag. But if you are providing a link in the content tag, it is
imperative that you include a summary.
References
<a href>http://www.atomenabled.org[/url]
<a href>http://ietfreport.isoc.org[/url]
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This article was imported from the CyberArmy University site. (original author: rae)
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