This tutorial introduced you to one of the more popular XML-based technologies in use today, RSS. Even though RSS has a somewhat confusing history, the resulting technology is relatively easy to understand and employ. Fortunately, you have lots of options when it comes to how you use RSS. If nothing else, as a web user you'll likely find RSS to be extremely useful as a means of keeping tabs on web sites that you might otherwise never take the time to visit regularly. Taking things a step further, you may elect to provide your own RSS news feeds for your own web pages. You might even get more ambitious and expand on the example in this chapter to develop a more full-featured news aggregator of your own. Regardless of how you choose to use RSS, it's an XML technology that is worth exploring and keeping tabs on.
Q&A
Q.
Is RSS 2.0 the only version of RSS I need to concern myself with?
A.
Yes and no. RSS 2.0 is certainly the most popular version of RSS in use today, which means you should focus the vast majority of your feed-related attention to it. However, there are enough sites out there that still use other versions of RSS that you may want to consider at some point brushing up on the other versions and how they differ from version 2.0. I wouldn't make this a huge priority at the moment, however. Your knowledge of other versions of RSS becomes more critical if you want to expand on the news aggregator sample stylesheet in this lesson to support other versions of RSS.
Q.
Can I include images in my RSS 2.0 documents?
A.
Yes. The <channel> tag supports a child <image> tag that allows you to specify an image for the channel. Additionally, the <item> tag supports a child <enclosure> tag that allows you to reference media objects including images and other media content. In fact, Apple's iTunes service relies on the <enclosure> tag to reference podcasts when you syndicate a podcast using RSS.
Q.
What versions of RSS does the online Feed Validator tool support?
A.
The Feed Validator tool supports RSS versions 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0, as well as Atom. The version of RSS that it uses for validation is determined automatically by the value of the version attribute in the <rss> tag of the document being validated.