Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

RDF in XML

In preparation for the rest of this chapter, we need to look at how RDF is written in XML.

The Root Element

In all the examples in this book, I have given the RDF attributes a prefix of rdf:. This isn’t necessary in many RDF documents, but it is the way they appear in RSS 1.0. For the sake of clarity, I will leave them in here too. Therefore, for reasons we will discuss later, the root element of an RDF document is:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
...
</rdf:RDF>

As you will see further on, the root element can also contain the URIs of additional RDF vocabularies. The following examples use elements from the RSS 1.0 vocabulary.

<element rdf:about="URI OF ELEMENT">

The rdf:about attribute defines the URI for the element that contains it. Remember, it is like the subject in a sentence: everything else refers to it. For example:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
>
<channel rdf:about="http://www.example.org/">
...
</channel>
</rdf:RDF>

means the channel resource is identified by the URI http://www.example.org/. Or, more to the point, everything within the channel element is referred to by http://www.example.org.

The contents of the element then describe the object referred to by the URI:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
         xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/" >
<channel rdf:about="http://www.example.org">
<title>Sausages are tasty for breakfast</title> <channel> ...