If you are using Firefox version 1.5, you may have found yourself on websites recently clicking on links that say “subscribe” or clicking on images like these only to get an odd looking page that does not appear to do anything. Welcome to the XML feed.

Clicking on a file that has an XML extension (.xml) while using Mozilla Firefox version 1.5 will load a page with the following text at the top… “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.”

Below that message you will see “the document tree” or the contents of the XML file, which look similar to an html text file. As an example I copied the beginning of an XML file found here and pasted a screenshot of some of the code here so we could discuss it.

The file begins with “rss version” which in this case is 2.0

“channel” comes before the feed “title” which in this case is Chiropractic News

“pubDate” is when the channel added new content

“webMaster” is the webmasters email address

“copyright” is who owns the feed

“description” tells us what the channel or feed is about

“link” gives us the feeds main site URL

“language” is “en” or English

“item” is used to define the first article

“description” here is related to the article

“pubDate” here is the date the article was added to the feed

“link” is the URL to the original article

After the “/link” tag there should be an “/item” tag which would be the end of the content. After that we would begin again with another item tag and follow the same pattern.

So in summary we have the following tags: rss version, channel, title, pubDate, webmaster, copyright, description, link, language, item, title, description, pubDate, link, and end item. There are many tags that can be added or used. I’ll put together a list and will add them here.

I’m working on cleaning this up, please be patient.