>I thought RSS feed had a protocol. If it is, why is it that some feeds have a field in the XML structure named lastBuildDate for the last date of the build and others dc:date? Or, is there simply one way of detecting that as everyone is using its own structure?

the dc: is simply a namespace prefix and there's never any guarantee that a feed is not 'namespaced'. To reliably parse all feeds you need to make sure you check the actual RSS protocol/version used since this makes a big difference.

It's a nice mess as usual with XML protocols <g>... standards start out with relatively simple protocols and then someone decides they needs some esoteric extension and screw up the simple format for a nasty complex one.

OTOH, Atom is probably where things are headed and it's a pretty clean protocol still... Most current feeds use RSS 2.0 which is the easiest of the bunch.


+++ Rick ---