RSS Namespace

Editor's Note: This is draft version 0.1 of this document, published Oct. 7, 2009. It has not yet been approved by the RSS Advisory Board and is offered for discussion purposes only.

1. Introduction

The RSS namespace enables elements from the RSS syndication format to be used in other XML dialects.

This namespace requires the "https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification" declaration in the top-level element of the XML dialect that's making use of RSS, as in the following example from an Atom feed.

The portion in bold is the RSS namespace declaration.

2. Conventions

In this documentation, the key words may, must, must not, optional, recommended, required, shall, shall not, should and should not are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

3. Restrictions

The following elements described in the RSS 2.0 specification may be used in this namespace:

All child elements of item
All optional child elements of channel except for pubDate and category.

Because RSS elements do not belong to a namespace in RSS documents, this namespace must not be declared in an RSS document.

The following sections describe several ways that RSS elements could be used in other XML formats.

4. RSSCloud Notification

The cloud element defines a server that enables software subscribing to a feed to be notified when the feed has been updated. The publisher of an Atom feed could use this element to identify a cloud server that monitors the feed.

<rss:cloud domain="server.example.com" path="/rpc" port="80" protocol="xml-rpc" registerProcedure="cloud.notify" />

This example, like all those in this document, assumes that "rss" is the prefix used in the namespace declaration.

A sample feed demonstrates how to incorporate this element in an Atom feed.

5. Images

The image element supplies a graphical image or logo that's associated with the document. The publisher of an OPML reading list could use this element to associate a Twitter avatar with the document.

<rss:image>
  <rss:link>http://techmeme.com</rss:link>
  <rss:title>Techmeme</rss:title>
  <rss:url>http://techmeme.com/techmeme_tl_normal.gif</rss:url>
  <rss:height>48</rss:height>
  <rss:width>48</rss:width>
</rss:image>

A sample feed demonstrates how to incorporate this element in an OPML document.