What Makes Up a Feed

For all the discussion given to syndication feeds, their format and use is really quite simple. Each feed contains a certain number of individual items, usually with a title, content, category, author, and date. The overall feed also has information such as source title, last update (time), update frequency, site owner, and so on. Within these simple fields, there are various options that can lead to a great deal of variety from feed to feed. To better understand these, we'll look at each of the three major feeds to see which fields are shared, and which are unique to the specific format.