<rss> tag?

[Xdega]

I was thinking about this. With such a huge amount of websites/forums that offer the ability to export rss feeds. I was thinking that a html tag that could simply be used to parse an rss feed (and then of course styled by css).
This could greatly streamline the process of including rich RSS content on your page.

I am not sure what paramaters would be needed but I am certain that a cuttoff=x attribute would be useful.

eg:

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<rss cuttoff=x> rss url </rss>

Not really enough info for a full on proposal atm, but figured I would open up some sort of discussion for sharing ideas and opinions. What do you guys think?

[JAB Creations]

Element, not tag, a tag is the start or end of an element so it's incorrect to reference an element by an individual tag 99% of the time.

The link element works just fine, the point of RSS is to feed XML and not in the same context that a website does.

[Xdega]

Essentially all this would do, is pull the txt data from a specified rss url
and print it on the page (subject to the pages .CSS styling).
The <link> tag or "element" would not work for this afaik.

[JAB Creations]

RSS feeds are XML, they can already be viewed in browsers and printed from them just fine if that's what you'd like.

[Xdega]

no, what I am thinking about here is to pull that xml file and stip/ignore the tags etc. Basically parse the file in to something human readable and then able to be manipulated via the web pages styling rules etc.

I understand it is possible to pull the raw xml via iframes. But that still leaves the nasty xml tags on the file etc.

This may be a little far fetched of an idea I know, just a suggestion though.

[Xdega]

I should also clarify that this would be used inside a page. Placed in <section> <article> etc.

[JAB Creations]

It sounds like you want to load an RSS feed via AJAX then and display it's like-HTML-XML in a website?

[Xdega]

It sounds like you want to load an RSS feed via AJAX then and display it's like-HTML-XML in a website?

Something like that yeah. With options to show only the most recent post or the entire stream.

You think of some of the new elements like integrated video etc, this would be similar really.

[JAB Creations]

Okay, then what would have to happen is you'd need some serverside scripting to determine if it's an AJAX request or a regular RSS request. I'm not sure how this would be useful though which is how I best understand things.

The way I would approach this is to set an HTTP query for the AJAX/HTML. Presuming the RSS's HTML and RSS feed are similar you have to deal with the fact that you can't import an RSS feed in to XHTML directly...

RSS Feed

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<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<atom:link href="http://www.example.com/rss/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<title>RSS Feed Example</title>
<link>http://www.example.com/</link>
<description>an example description of this RSS Feed goes here.</description>

  <item>
   <title>An Example Title</title>
   <pubDate>Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:25 -0500</pubDate>
   <guid>http://www.example.com/example1</guid>
   <link>http://www.example.com/example1</link>
   <description>An example description goes here.</description>
  </item>

</channel>
</rss>

XHTML Ajax loadable content

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<div id="ajax_rss" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<!-- Your RSS Feed HTML here -->
</div>

...and looking at that code I'm not sure you're going to be able to validate an RSS feed with XHTML compatible code.

Which means you'd have to do a bit of server side scripting to determine if you should serve XHTML or RSS related XML. You would loop through each news article with the item element and either serve the RSS elements or XHTML elements.

[Xdega]

Maybe some "required" user specified attributes could be used to clarify the type of feed. Also the cuttoff could be measured by the amount of "tags" ( <xxx> ) the parser sees. An optional xsl style sheet attribute could also be used to assist the rendering.

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<rss type=rss cuttoff=2 xsl=css.xsl></rss>


Obviously this would require the user knowing a little about the feed, but if it could replace a plethora of javascripting for easy implementation, then it's a win.

[JAB Creations]

Unless you can provide a real life scenario where what you're trying to achieve would be useful then server side scripting is what you would need to serve the content either as (X)HTML or an XML RSS feed because I am not following what you're trying to suggest your latest post.

[Xdega]

First off. After examining some existing rss/xml feeds. I have found that the <rss> tag is already used whithin them documents. As a result lets assume the element is called the <feed> element. Another thing I noted, is that at the top of the file, there is information that can be used to determine how to parse the data. As an example from a random twitter feed shows:

<rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0" xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" xmlns:twitter="http://api.twitter.com">

Basically the real world example that prompted this suggestion is a project I have just started working on. As a "pre-dev" splash page. I want to implement an rss feed directly from twitter and put the "latest dev update" on the front page. Dynamically updating without page refresh would not be a requirement.

To issustrate better, here is the web page: http://www.playkoco.com/

and here is where I would propose simply using a HTML element instead of a bunch of scripting:

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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
   <head>
      <meta charset="utf-8">
      <meta name="description" content="Online Action Trading Card Game.">
      <title>KOCO: Online Action TCG</title>
      <link href="kocostyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
   </head>

   <body>
      <header></header>
      <section id=splash>
         <img src=images/logo_trans_matte.gif>
      </section>
         <p>Action Based: Online TCG</p>
      <hr>
      <h1>DEV UPDATES</h1>
      <section>
      <!-- RSS TWITTER FEED HERE-->
      <p>An RSS feed from Twitter containing the latest updates for the development of KOCO, will be displayed here.</p>
      <!-- RSS TWITTER FEED HERE-->
      </section>
      <p><a href=#>more</a></p>
      <hr>
      <footer>
         <p>This website makes extensive use of new web based technologies and coding.
         <br>We recomend that you make sure you are running the
         <a href=#>latest version</a> of your current web browser. </p>
         <p id=copyright> &copy; 2010 King Of Cards Online || liamhockley@hotmail.com </p>
      </footer>
   </body>
   
</html>


Inside the comment tag, the <feed> element would be like so:

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<section>
<!-- RSS TWITTER FEED HERE-->
<p><feed href=http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/230845588.rss></feed></p>
<!-- RSS TWITTER FEED HERE-->
</section>


hope that sheds a little more light on my suggestion.

[BlueBoden]

I'm not sure if this goes for RSS at this point, but the main benefits using XHTML, for designers, is that they can mix the markup, with markup from other XML based languages. If I'm not totally mistaken, this should include rss.

Including all sorts of tags for individual languages, is pointless, and would sort of eliminate the only benefit designers have, using xhtml.

Either way, as a developer, i would most likely prefer to parse the file on the server side, and output its content directly in my pages, using the relevant html elements.