The Structure Of An Atom Feed

Think of a weblog, or in fact any website with frequently updated content, like CNN.com. The site itself has a title (“CNN.com”), a subtitle (“Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment & Video News”), a last-updated date (“updated 12:43 p.m. EDT, Sat May 16, 2009”), and a list of articles posted at different times. Each article also has a title, a first-published date (and maybe also a last-updated date, if they published a correction or fixed a typo), and a unique URL.

The Atom syndication format is designed to capture all of this information in a standard format. My weblog and CNN.com are wildly different in design, scope, and audience, but they both have the same basic structure. CNN.com has a title; my blog has a title. CNN.com publishes articles; I publish articles.

At the top level is the root element, which every Atom feed shares: the feed element in the http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom namespace.