Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

The Atom Entry Document in Detail

Now that you have the building blocks of Atom, let’s move on to the details. We’ll first look at the standard elements of an Atom entry document.

Atom entry documents not only make up the bulk of an Atom feed but are also used as the transport for the Atom Publishing API and as a format for web site archives. For example, using the Atom entry document format as an archive template for your weblog seems an increasingly good idea.

The Elements of Atom Entry

entry

Within an Atom entry document, the entry element is the root, which must have a version attribute to denote the version of Atom you are deploying. This book is based on the draft-05, whose version identifier is draft-ietf-atompub-format-05: do not deploy. Subtlety isn’t its strong point, you have to admit. This element may also contain any number of XML namespace declarations for the use of other XML vocabularies. I cover this in Chapter 11.

If the entry is part of a feed document, this element has no attributes. Either way, the remainder of the elements are all children of entry.

title

The title element is a Text construct that gives the title of the entry. The entry must have one, and only one.

link

link, a Link construct, gives details of related URIs. There must be at least one with a rel attribute of alternate, but there can’t be more than one of these with the same type value. This most commonly points to the HTML version of the resource, as with the link element in both flavors of RSS. ...