There are five main flavors of RSS -- 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0 -- and within each specification there can be significant variation.
Item elements, for instance, can appear as siblings of the channel element rather than children.
The aim of DOMIT! RSS is to consolidate these variances under a single API, which allows you to read a feed from an url and programatically pull data from its elements.
One advantage of using DOMIT! RSS is that it piggybacks on top of the DOMIT! XML parser. You therefore have available, in addition to the DOMIT! RSS API, the standard methods and properties of the DOM XML specification.
DOMIT! RSS has a caching system that stores feeds locally, only refreshing them from the url when the time you specify has expired.
It also comes in two versions:
DOMIT! RSS, which exposes the full power of the API but is weightier than you may require in some circumstances.
DOMIT! RSS Lite, which exposes only a subset of the API (that pertaining to title, link, and description elements) and is consequently lighterweight and faster.
DOMIT! RSS is written in pure PHP, so it should work identically from PHP 4.0 and up, without the need for PHP extensions.
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