Author: John Fowler

An RSS feed is a great feature to have on your Web site. It can get you regular inbound traffic and will give you some bonus points with search engines as it will indicate that you always have fresh materials on your site. Search engines really put an emphasis on those aspects these days. However, you have to make sure that you can generate new content and add items to the site on a regular basis. Having a feed which is updated only every now and then will not realize any of the above-mentioned advantages.

XML

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is a markup language like HTML but while HTML displays data, XML describes data. XML code can be written in any text editor. However, there are also dedicated XML editors. If you would like to try one of those, you might want to try XML Buddy.

Let's take a look at a short xml code as an example:

<name>John smith</name>
<gender>male</gender>
<age>56</age>

This simple example is an XML file that describes a person's name, sex and age. From a quick glance at these 3 simple lines you can understand the way XML works:

1. Each piece of information is encapsulated in a pair of description tags.
2. The description tags are not predefined .You get to name the tags!

Let's take a look at another example:

<name>
        <first>John</first>
        <last>Smith</last>
</name>
<gender>male</gender>
<age>56</age>

The purpose of this example is to show you that one data set can consist of more subsets of data. In this case the name set consists of two subsets: 'first' and 'last', each describing the first name and last name of the person respectively. Pretty simple isn’t it?