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RSS Feed Example

A sample RSS 2.0 feed you can view as a sortable table or a foldable tree. Below the sample, the format is explained — plus how to use Pretty JSON & XML to inspect any RSS, Atom, or podcast feed in seconds.

The sample

A minimal RSS 2.0 feed with three items — title, link, publication date, description:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Pretty JSON &amp; XML Blog</title>
    <link>https://prettyjsonxml.com/</link>
    <description>Updates from the JSON &amp; XML viewer</description>
    <language>en-us</language>

    <item>
      <title>Virtual scrolling lands for huge JSON arrays</title>
      <link>https://prettyjsonxml.com/guide/view-json-as-table.html</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description>Tables with 30,000+ rows now render only the visible window — no more frozen tabs.</description>
    </item>

    <item>
      <title>Feedback popover added to the header</title>
      <link>https://prettyjsonxml.com/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 May 2026 18:30:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description>Three pre-categorized mailto links so reporting bugs is one click.</description>
    </item>

    <item>
      <title>JSON-native tree view with foldable brackets</title>
      <link>https://prettyjsonxml.com/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description>For JSON sources, Tree view now uses native JSON syntax — { } [ ] foldable, not synthetic XML tags.</description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>
Try it: Click "View this sample as a table" above. The viewer auto-detects <item> as the repeated element and renders three rows with Title, Link, PubDate, Description as columns.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format for publishing frequently updated content — blog posts, news headlines, podcast episodes, GitHub commits. A feed has one <channel> at the root, some metadata about the publication (title, link, description), then a list of <item> elements where each item is one piece of content.

The format dates to 1999 and is still everywhere — most blogs, podcasts, GitHub releases, and news sites expose an RSS feed even today. The basic structure looks like this:

Why view RSS as a table?

RSS feeds are designed for machines (feed readers) but humans need to look at them too — debugging publishing pipelines, inspecting third-party feeds, comparing two podcast feeds, or just reading raw content without a feed reader.

Reading RSS as raw XML is exhausting — items are deeply indented and you can't easily compare them. Reading it as a table lets you:

How Pretty JSON & XML handles RSS

When you paste an RSS feed, the viewer:

  1. Detects <item> as the repeated element (there are 2+ of them with the same tag)
  2. Renders each item as a row in the Table view
  3. Picks the most useful fields as columns based on frequency and naming — usually title, link, pubDate, description
  4. Shows the channel-level metadata (title, link, language) above the table as a "context" strip

Click any row to see the full item including any optional fields like guid, category, author, enclosure (used for podcast audio), or custom namespaces (itunes:, media:, etc.).

Works for Atom too

Atom feeds (the newer alternative to RSS, often served at /atom.xml) have the same shape — a feed wrapper with repeated <entry> elements. Pretty JSON & XML handles them identically: paste an Atom feed and you get a sortable table of entries.

Open the viewer and paste your own feed →

More examples