Can I serve RSS in JSON?
json, rss, xml
Solution
You're right that the client reading the feed would have to have custom support for whatever the particulars of your JSON were. So you'd either need to make a custom feed reader to consume that information, or someone would have to propose a JSON feed standard, and it'd have to be widely adopted.
Well, I think your desires have finally been met, friend!
Take a look at JSON Feed. As of this writing it's only about a week old, but it's already picking up steam, having been supported now by Feedly, Feedbin, News Explorer, NewsBlur, and more being added all the time.
If I had to pick a standard to use when generating a JSON version of RSS, I'd pick JSON Feed for sure.
Problem
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", } ] } ```