type= application/rssxml /

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What is the correct MIME type to use for an RSS feed?

Is one MIME type preferable to ensure compatibility with RSS readers and other scrapers?

The options seem to be:

text/rss+xml

Interestingly Stackoverflow is using text/html.

7 Answers 7

Neither. It's application/rss+xml http://www.rssboard.org/rss-mime-type-application.txt

Other commenters have pointed out that the single correct mime type is application/rss+xml, .

However, if you are setting an accept header for a client then

Accept: application/rss+xml, application/rdf+xml;q=0.8, application/atom+xml;q=0.6, application/xml;q=0.4, text/xml;q=0.4

might be a good choice, as it states that it accepts RSS, Atom, and XML (in descending order or preference).

Here's a pragmatic answer: whatever the "correct" answer may be (and clearly there is debate about this), text/xml is the type used by pretty much all the popular feeds out there in the wild.

Here are a few that I checked:

So you can be sure that text/xml will be correctly interpreted by commonly used RSS clients.

The most correct is application/rss+xml

The most compatible is application/xml

According to W3C:

RSS feeds should be served as application/rss+xml (RSS 1.0 is an RDF format, so it may be served as application/rdf+xml instead). Atom feeds should use application/atom+xml. Alternatively, for compatibility with widely-deployed web browsers, any of these feeds can use one of the more general XML types - preferably application/xml.

https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/warning/UnexpectedContentType.html

Go for MIME application/rss+xml to be safe if you want to make sure your feed is compatible with RSS readers and other scrapers. That's what I use.

You could use text/xml , but the correct MIME type would be application/rss+xml .

4 application/xml is prefered over text/xml because XML doesn't follow normal text content encoding rules. It can embed its encoding in its data, which will cause problems if proxies try to blindly transcode the text. In other words, proxies are instructed to preserve the data byte-for-byte. – Zenexer May 27, 2014 at 12:16

text/xml is the only correct answer. Mime types are a registration based system. There is an official list managed by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) at http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml

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Feed Validation Service

Check the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds

Feeds should not be served with the ' type/subtype ' media type

Explanation

The web server is reporting an unexpected MIME type for a feed. Although we tried to parse it as a feed, aggregators may well report this as an error and act as if the user had pointed them at something other than a feed.

RSS feeds should be served as application/rss+xml (RSS 1.0 is an RDF format, so it may be served as application/rdf+xml instead). Atom feeds should use application/atom+xml . Alternatively, for compatibility with widely-deployed web browsers, any of these feeds can use one of the more general XML types - preferably application/xml .

Use the appropriate MIME type for your feed.

Not clear? Disagree?

You might be able to find help in one of these fine resources .

The Proper Content Type for XML Feeds

RSS Feeds have a content type problem. Most people end up serving them with the content-type: text/xml . But this practice is frowned upon for several reasons. The main reason people don't like text/xml is because its very vague, there are content types such as application/rss+xml , application/rdf+xml , and application/atom+xml that describe the content of your feed much better than text/xml does. We should be using these types for our feeds.

The problem, however with the more descriptive content types is that Firefox and IE prompt you to download the XML file instead of displaying it in the browser like it would a text/xml document.

So what I have decided to do, is to serve the feeds as text/xml if the user agent contains Mozilla . So for IE, Firefox, and Safari 1.x my feed will be served in text/xml other clients will get the proper application/rss+xml MIME type. Here's my code for this:

I realize that this is not a perfect solution, it may cause browser plugins to have to do some extra work to determine if the document is an RSS, RDF or Atom Feed. Additionally if aggregators are including Mozilla in their user agent, they will get text/xml . But I'm not going to risk loosing potential subscribers over this issue, as some bloggers have reported to be the case when switching.

So I will serve a variable content-type at least until bug 256379 is fixed in a production release of FireFox (or if IE beats them I guess :). You can vote for that bug in bugzilla if you find the save dialog to be annoying when you click on RSS feeds.

I also hope that IE7 is will serve the rss related content-types as it would a text/xml doc by default. Scoble, can you make sure IE7 deals with this? (apparently Robert Scoble will read your post if you put his name in it...)

Tim Bray has pointed out why its important for people to get their act together:

To manage the traffic load we're going to have to do some caching. Fortunately, RSS contains some publication and expiry-date data to help intermediate software do this, but to do this it has to recognize the data as RSS and read this stuff. This isn't going to happen until RSS gets served with the proper Media-type. When someone writes RSS-reader code to live in the Web Browser, it's going to need a consistent Media-type to be able to recognize RSS.

Yet Another Community System cites some of the problems with text/xml such as the character set issues:

The default character set, which must be assumed in the absence of a charset parameter, is US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1 for all MIME types prefixed by text, depending of the Request for Comment you are considering. Of course, having two different specifications is confusing to the software industry. But also, no one of these two charsets can support complex foreign charsets as those used in Asia. On the other hand, implementors and users of XML parsers tend to assume that the default charset is provided by the XML encoding declaration or BOM.

Like this? Follow me ↯

The Proper Content Type for XML Feeds was first published on June 13, 2005.

If you like reading about rss, xml, atom, rdf, content-type, http, mime, firefox, ie, or mozilla then you might also like:

XML Tutorial

Xpath tutorial, xslt tutorial, xquery tutorial, xsd data types, web services.

With RSS it is possible to distribute up-to-date web content from one web site to thousands of other web sites around the world.

RSS allows fast browsing for news and updates.

RSS Document Example

What is rss.

Why use RSS?

RSS was designed to show selected data.

Without RSS, users will have to check your site daily for new updates. This may be too time-consuming for many users. With an RSS feed (RSS is often called a News feed or RSS feed) they can check your site faster using an RSS aggregator (a site or program that gathers and sorts out RSS feeds).

Since RSS data is small and fast-loading, it can easily be used with services like cell phones or PDA's.

Web-rings with similar information can easily share data on their web sites to make them better and more useful.

Who Should use RSS?

Webmasters who seldom update their web sites do not need RSS!

RSS is useful for web sites that are updated frequently, like:

Benefits of RSS

Here are some benefits of using RSS:

Choose your news With RSS you can choose to view the news you want, the news that interest you and are relevant to your work.

Remove unwanted information With RSS you can (finally) separate wanted information from unwanted information (spam)!

Increase your site traffic With RSS you can create your own news channel, and publish it to the Internet!

The History of RSS

RSS 1.0 is the only version that was developed using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard.

The idea behind RDF was to help create a Semantic Web. However, this does not matter too much for ordinary users, but by using web standards it will be easier for persons and applications to exchange data.

What RSS Version Should I Use?

RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 are easier to understand than RSS 1.0. Our tutorial is based on RSS 2.0.

The syntax rules of RSS 2.0 are very simple and very strict.

Is RSS a Web Standard?

There is no official standard for RSS.

How RSS Works

RSS is used to share content between websites.

With RSS, you register your content with companies called aggregators.

So, to be a part of it: First, create an RSS document and save it with an .xml extension. Then, upload the file to your website. Next, register with an RSS aggregator. Each day the aggregator searches the registered websites for RSS documents, verifies the link, and displays information about the feed so clients can link to documents that interests them.

Tip: Read our RSS Publishing chapter to view free RSS aggregation services.

RSS Example

RSS documents use a self-describing and simple syntax.

Here is a simple RSS document:

The first line in the document - the XML declaration - defines the XML version and the character encoding used in the document. In this case the document conforms to the 1.0 specification of XML and uses the UTF-8 character set.

The next line is the RSS declaration which identifies that this is an RSS document (in this case, RSS version 2.0).

The next line contains the <channel> element. This element is used to describe the RSS feed.

The <channel> element has three required child elements:

Each <channel> element can have one or more <item> elements.

Each <item> element defines an article or "story" in the RSS feed.

The <item> element has three required child elements:

Finally, the two last lines close the <channel> and <rss> elements.

Comments in RSS

The syntax for writing comments in RSS is similar to that of HTML:

RSS is Written in XML

Because RSS is XML, keep in mind that:

The RSS <channel> Element

The RSS <channel> element describes the RSS feed.

Look at the following RSS document:

As mentioned before, the <channel> element describes the RSS feed, and has three required child elements:

The <channel> element usually contains one or more <item> elements. Each <item> element defines an article or "story" in the RSS feed.

Furthermore, there are several optional child elements of <channel>. We will explain the most important ones below.

The <category> Element

The <category> child element is used to specify a category for your feed.

The <category> element makes it possible for RSS aggregators to group sites based on category.

The category for the RSS document above could be:

The <copyright> Element

The <copyright> child element notifies about copyrighted material.

The copyright for the RSS document above could be:

The <image> Element

The <image> child element allows an image to be displayed when aggregators present a feed.

The <image> element has three required child elements:

The image for the RSS document above could be:

The <language> Element

The <language> child element is used to specify the language used to write your document.

The <language> element makes it possible for RSS aggregators to group sites based on language.

The language for the RSS document above could be:

The <item> Element

Each <item> element defines an article or "story" in an RSS feed.

As mentioned before, each <item> element defines an article or "story" in the RSS feed.

Furthermore, there are several optional child elements of <item>. We will explain the most important ones below.

The <author> Element

The <author> child element is used to specify the e-mail address of the author of an item.

Note: To prevent spam e-mails, some developers do not include the <author> element.

The author of the item in the RSS document above could be:

The <comments> Element

The <comments> child element allows an item to link to comments about that item.

A comment of the item in the RSS document above could be:

The <enclosure> Element

The <enclosure> child element allows a media-file to be included with an item.

The <enclosure> element has three required attributes:

A media-file included in the item in the RSS document above could be:

Get Your RSS Feed Up On The Web

Having an RSS document is not useful if other people cannot reach it.

Now it's time to get your RSS file up on the web. Here are the steps:

1. Name your RSS file. Notice that the file must have an .xml extension.

2. Validate your RSS file

3. Upload the RSS file to your web directory on your web server.

5. Put the little orange "RSS" or "XML" button on the page where you will offer RSS to the world (e.g. on your home page). Then add a link to the button that links to the RSS file. The code will look something like this: <a href="https://www.w3schools.com/xml/myfirstrss.xml"> <img src="https://www.w3schools.com/xml/pic_rss.gif" width="36" height="14"> </a>.

6. Submit your RSS feed to the RSS Feed Directories (you can Google or Yahoo for "RSS Feed Directories"). Note! The URL to your feed is not your home page, it is the URL to your feed, like "https://www.w3schools.com/xml/myfirstrss.xml".

7. Register your feed with the major search engines:

Google - http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner

8. Update your feed - After registering your RSS feed, you must make sure that you update your content frequently and that your RSS feed is constantly available.

Can I Manage my RSS Feed Myself?

The best way to ensure your RSS feed works the way you want, is to manage it yourself.

However, this can be very time consuming, especially for pages with lot of updates.

An alternative is to use a third-party automated RSS.

Automated RSS

For users who only need an RSS feed for their personal website, some of the most popular blog (Web Log) managers that offer built-in RSS services are:

RSS Readers

An RSS Reader is used to read RSS Feeds!

RSS readers are available for many different devices and OS.

There are a lot of different RSS readers. Some work as web services, and some are limited to windows (or Mac, PDA or UNIX):

I have an RSS Reader. Now what?

Rss reference, the <channel> element.

The links in the "Element" column point to more information about each specific element.

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Report Error

If you want to report an error, or if you want to make a suggestion, do not hesitate to send us an e-mail:

[email protected]

Your Suggestion:

Thank you for helping us.

Your message has been sent to W3Schools.

Developer Resources

Feed_content_type( string $type = '' ).

Returns the content type for specified feed type.

Default: ''

File: wp-includes/feed.php . View all references

View on Trac View on GitHub

Filters the content type for a specific feed type.

User Contributed Notes

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Insert/edit link

Enter the destination URL

Or link to existing content

How to add a RSS feed to a Remix app

Summary ❧ Remix allows you to generate responses for any kind of page, not just rendering React components, which can be used to easily create a RSS feed for a blog.

One of the advantages of using Remix is that you have access to the server side code and can easily generate responses for any kind of page, not just rendering React components. For example, you can create a RSS feed for your blog fairly easily.

Since I first created my website, Remix added a new feature, called resource routes , which are essentially pages that do not render any components and instead just return some data (JSON, XML, etc), which is perfect for making a RSS feed.

I set up my RSS feed under the root path: camchenry.com/rss.xml . I created a file called [rss.xml].tsx in the app/routes directory. The file name contains brackets [] , because Remix normally converts a period ( . ) to a slash in the URL by convention. But we want to change the URL to contain .xml , so we need to escape it by using the brackets.

Every RSS file has a number of required and optional fields , but in this case we're only using the bare minimum of required fields to get it working.

A RSS file is essentially just a list of items, so we create a type definition for each entry:

Then, we will define a function to generate the XML for the RSS feed based on our list of RSS entries:

A few notes:

Finally, to create a resource route, we need to export a loader from our file without exporting any other functions. Instead of rendering HTML like normal, the server will render this response instead:

A brief explanation of some of the code above:

Now when we visit /rss.xml we should see a XML RSS feed!

window.__remixContext = {'actionData':undefined,'appState':{'trackBoundaries':true,'trackCatchBoundaries':true,'catchBoundaryRouteId':null,'renderBoundaryRouteId':null,'loaderBoundaryRouteId':null,'error':undefined,'catch':undefined},'matches':[{'params':{'id':'how-to-add-a-rss-feed-to-a-remix-app'},'pathname':'/','route':{'id':'root','parentId':undefined,'path':'','index':undefined,'caseSensitive':undefined,'module':'/build/root-PRXUKHUD.js','imports':['/build/_shared/chunk-JLSLGHFA.js','/build/_shared/chunk-NXAQUFTA.js'],'hasAction':false,'hasLoader':true,'hasCatchBoundary':true,'hasErrorBoundary':true}},{'params':{'id':'how-to-add-a-rss-feed-to-a-remix-app'},'pathname':'/blog','route':{'id':'routes/blog','parentId':'root','path':'blog','index':undefined,'caseSensitive':undefined,'module':'/build/routes/blog-IUEKA3YY.js','imports':undefined,'hasAction':false,'hasLoader':false,'hasCatchBoundary':false,'hasErrorBoundary':false}},{'params':{'id':'how-to-add-a-rss-feed-to-a-remix-app'},'pathname':'/blog/how-to-add-a-rss-feed-to-a-remix-app','route':{'id':'routes/blog/$id','parentId':'routes/blog','path':':id','index':undefined,'caseSensitive':undefined,'module':'/build/routes/blog/$id-VLOHT4TW.js','imports':['/build/_shared/chunk-625P7U27.js','/build/_shared/chunk-JLSLGHFA.js','/build/_shared/chunk-Q6NLR2QD.js','/build/_shared/chunk-TDSTOPS5.js','/build/_shared/chunk-NXAQUFTA.js'],'hasAction':false,'hasLoader':true,'hasCatchBoundary':false,'hasErrorBoundary':false}}],'routeData':{'root':{},'routes/blog/$id':{'text':' One of the advantages of using Remix is that you have access to the server side code and can easily generate responses for any kind of page, not just rendering React components. For example, you can create a RSS feed for your blog fairly easily. \n Since I first created my website, Remix added a new feature, called resource routes , which are essentially pages that do not render any components and instead just return some data (JSON, XML, etc), which is perfect for making a RSS feed. \n I set up my RSS feed under the root path: camchenry.com/rss.xml . I created a file called [rss.xml].tsx in the app/routes directory. The file name contains brackets [] , because Remix normally converts a period ( . ) to a slash in the URL by convention. But we want to change the URL to contain .xml , so we need to escape it by using the brackets. \n Every RSS file has a number of required and optional fields , but in this case we\'re only using the bare minimum of required fields to get it working. \n A RSS file is essentially just a list of items, so we create a type definition for each entry: \n // app/routes/[rss.xml].tsx \n export type RssEntry = {\n title : string ;\n link: string ;\n description: string ;\n pubDate: string ;\n author?: string ;\n guid?: string ;\n};\n \n Then, we will define a function to generate the XML for the RSS feed based on our list of RSS entries: \n export function generateRss ( {\n description,\n entries,\n link,\n title,\n}: {\n title: string ;\n description: string ;\n link: string ;\n entries: RssEntry[];\n} ): string {\n return `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">\n <channel>\n <title> ${title} </title>\n <description> ${description} </description>\n <link> ${link} </link>\n <language>en-us</language>\n <ttl>60</ttl>\n <atom:link href="https://YOUR_SITE_HERE.com/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />\n ${entries\n .map(\n (entry) => `\n <item>\n <title><![CDATA[ ${entry.title} ]]></title>\n <description><![CDATA[ ${entry.description} ]]></description>\n <pubDate> ${entry.pubDate} </pubDate>\n <link> ${entry.link} </link>\n ${entry.guid ? `<guid isPermaLink="false"> ${entry.guid} </guid>` : "" } \n </item>` \n )\n .join( "" )} \n </channel>\n</rss>` ;\n}\n \n A few notes: \n \n The guid tag is used to uniquely identify the piece of content, and can just be the URL of the content, hence why it also has the isPermaLink attribute set to false to indicate that the URL may change.

Working With Web Feeds: It’s More Than RSS

Between Google Chrome experimenting with “following” sites , along with a growing frustration of how social media platforms limit a creator’s reach to their fans through algorithmic feeds, there’s been renewed interest in RSS feeds and they’re primed for a comeback as we get into 2022.

I miss the days of RSS, where each website could plant its own little flag on the internet, rather than a massive, blunt algorithm deciding what people are allowed to see. I've still got an RSS feed, but I don't think anyone who isn't tech-savvy really uses it. — The Oatmeal (@Oatmeal) July 7, 2021

This research is brought to you by support from Frontend Masters , CSS-Tricks’ official learning partner.