RSS Feed :: Parsing

I was searching around to find out how to parse the RSS feed using either PHP or jQuery and finally came upon a script that will take an RSS feed (using jQuery) and output the information into a friendly format that is easy to customize.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/226663/parse-rss-with-jquery

This is something that I will definitely use come time to parse a feed.

RSS Feeds

RSS = Really Simple Syndication

RSS is used for a variety of different things, but is mainly used for streaming a news feed to the public.  Instead of visiting every single site, trying to catch up on news from every source, a person can use an RSS Aggregator which pulls in all the news feeds from each site he is subscribed to.  Some popular sites that aggregate these feeds are Google Reader and Yahoo Pipes.  Apple's Mail application also has an option to bring feeds in along with your email, so you can get all of your important information in one location.

RSS is formatted using XML to store its data.  Each line item is stored in an <item> tag with the following sub tags to store pieces of data about that particular item:

• <title> - The title of the article
• <link> - A link to where the article is located on the hosts' server
• <author> - The email address of the author
• <category> - Which type of categories the article relates to
• <pubDate> - Date that the article was published

References:

http://www.whatisrss.com/

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#hrelementsOfLtitemgt

jQuery Mobile

This is a library that I have used a decent amount at the company I work for:

http://www.flintenergies.com/mobile/home.aspx

Here is a website developed on the Sitefinity CMS using jQuery Mobile as its interface.  Fairly simple syntax to learn and deploy, but all the kinks are not out of it quite yet.  I had quite a few issues with page transitions - meaning, when a link was clicked, it would not transition to the next page.  It did have quite a few features that allowed it to do motion transitions, which was very nice, but did not work across all mobile platforms.

Can this be used in conjunction with PhoneGap?  I do not know quite yet.  Once I dive into PhoneGap, I will then be able to determine how useful this will be for the RSS program.