Chapter 5. RSS 1.0

You see, I needed to go to hell. I was, you might say, homesick.

Nick Tosches, The Last Opium Den

Most of the feeds we've seen so far have been very simple. They provide little information beyond what is needed for the instant gratification of displaying the feed in a human-readable form. Of course, this isn't such a bad deal; many people only want to display the feeds as they come.

Others, however require a far richer set of feeds. For this, many people are using the RSS 1.0 flavor of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). In this chapter, we'll look at the metadata options RSS 2.0 provides and why you might want (or need) more. Then I'll give a basic overview of RDF and a thorough rundown of RSS 1.0 itself.