I am writing an RSS feed (for fun) and was looking at the spec here.
RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.
Obviously this means that I am not serving 'pure' RSS if I choose the JSON option. That said, if I conform to the rest of the spec, is it likely that (customised) readers will be able to parse it?
To put it another way, if I conform to the spec, but using JSON instead of XML is it a usable RSS feed?
edit I am not sure I made myself clear. There is no XML involved. I want to write something akin to RSS (which is XML) using JSON instead. Obviously the readers of such a feed would need to be written to understand the JSON format. I was wondering if this had been done already. Are there services that serve a feed this way? Are there programs that can aggregate/understand this format. Is the RSS spec (sans the XML part) a useful spec to conform to in this case?
rg
{
"title":"example.com",
"link":"http://www.example.com/",
"description":"Awesome news about junk",
"items":[
{
"title":"An article",
"link":"http://www.example.com/an-article",
"descrition":"Some sample text here",
"pubDate":"2008-10-27 11:06 EST",
"author":"example author",
},
{
"title":"Second",
"link":"http://www.example.com/Seond",
"descrition":"Some sample text here",
"pubDate":"2008-10-25 23:20 EST",
"author":"author mcauthor",
},
{
"title":"third article",
"link":"http://www.example.com/third-article",
"descrition":"Some sample text here",
"pubDate":"2008-10-25 23:18 EST",
"author":"some other author",
}
]
}
Answer
No, RSS is an XML-based format, and JSON is an different language rather than some kind of dialect. RSS readers won't understand JSON.
Your question is akin to asking 'Can I speak French in Chinese?'