Diving In

Nearly all the chapters in this book revolve around a piece of sample code. But xml isn’t about code; it’s about data. One common use of xml is “syndication feeds” that list the latest articles on a blog, forum, or other frequently-updated website. Most popular blogging software can produce a feed and update it whenever new articles, discussion threads, or blog posts are published. You can follow a blog by “subscribing” to its feed, and you can follow multiple blogs with a dedicated “feed aggregator” like Google Reader.

Here, then, is the XML data we’ll be working with in this chapter. It’s a feed — specifically, an Atom syndication feed.