It depends on the way a site is built/what platform is used to build it as to whether an RSS feed is auto-generated or must be created manually.Ī web page manually coded using HTML or other language will not have an RSS feed automatically available. Not all web pages are alike when it comes to the availability of an RSS feed. Auto-generated RSS is the easiest to use as the feed is already formatted and coded, with a feed URL ready for you to use as you need. In other words, RSS XML is automatically generated for their pages. For a page containing just HTML, the process of extracting tags to use as XML is relatively simple where a page contains a variety of code from different languages, things get more complex.Ġ.Many platforms that use more than simple HTML, such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, provide native RSS support. Not all web pages are composed using HTML as there are many other ways to call, manage and deliver content to a web page, including PHP, JavaScript and other languages. An RSS feed typically includes images, video, text and a link to the originating page. Similar to HTML, XML uses a tag-based language to create a structured summary of a feed source – typically a web page but can be a database or other data source. The way this information is ‘fed’ from a web page is via an XML (eXtended Markup Language) document. Our example below shows a feed from a YouTube channel. RSS is also commonly used to deliver blog content or newsfeeds.

Utilizing HTML tags to create an XML summary of web page content, RSS is specifically designed to cater for syndication of content, often in an excerpted format. For example, RSS can be used to deliver the information on ticker tape feeds which might show the latest stock values, exchange rates or the price of commodities. RSS feeds are the syndication of online content, provided in a complete or a summary form using XML.

What does an rss feed do