Can I serve RSS in JSON?
I believe this has been done already.
Take a look at this jQuery extension: jFeed - RSS/ATOM feed parser
jQuery.getFeed(options);Options:
- url:
- data:
- success:
Example:
jQuery.getFeed({ url: 'rss.xml', success: function(feed) { alert(feed.title); } });Note that in this case, 'feed' would be a javascript object. If you wanted to pass this using JSON, you can just use the javascript JSON utility.
Example:
var myJSONText = JSON.stringify(feed);
Is the RSS spec (sans the XML part) a useful spec to conform to in this case?
If you want to invent yet another syndication format, I recommend using Atom as a base. IMHO it has much cleaner, more consistent design, and has useful features like reliable updates of past items, makes distinction between summaries and full content, etc.
I was wondering if this had been done already.
Flickr has JSON output format. They even have lolcode feed.