

There were a couple of RDF feeds which I wanted to use, specifically the feed and the feed. The format caters for describing the content of the web resource, including items such as title, description and URL. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is an W3C XML format for describing web resources. Included in the RssReader is the ability to read simple RDF format feeds. Details of the tokens are in the documentation. These tokensmap to the RSS fields available. This is a simple tool I wrote to turn a RssFeed object into an HTML (or any other format) document, given a template containing tokens. Also included in the class library is a class called RssHtmlMaker. I added several static methods to make the process even simpler, they're all self explanatory. This URL can be in the format of file:// as well as the standard if you want to open a local file (it's not been tried with ftp://). The RssReader class has one main method, RetrieveFeed which returns an RssFeed object, given a URL. The RssItem type maps to an RSS item, containing most of the fields available to an RssItem. There is an Items property, which contains a collection of RssItem objects. In this are most (some haven't been implemented in this version) of the fields that RSS offers.

Given the simplicity of the RSS format, it was straightforward to map its structure to a value type ( struct).The image below shows the RssFeed object. Each item node contains elements to describe themselves - title, description and link are the 3 required elements, there are other optional ones which you can read about in the specification and the RssReader class docs. Then, after these is a list of articles, headlines, stories or whatever they contain in the form of item nodes. Inside this channel node, there are a number of elements to describe the feed. As the image below shows, it contains a root RSS node, which has a channel node beneath it. The RSS format is true to its name - simple. For example, the New York Times provide an RSS feed of their main headlines, which you can access and put inside your own site or application. It's an XML format for retrieving, typically, headlines or the latest article details from other sites. The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) specification is found at. The class, as its name suggests, only reads RSS feeds - it has no capabilities for writing feeds. The purpose of this, RssReader class, is to provide a simple tool for retrieving RSS feeds from remote and local sources, without needing to parse XML in each application you require the RSS feed in.

There's already quite a comprehensive RSS tool on The Code Project: RSS 2.0 Framework written by "Jerry Maguire".
