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We are creating a feed specifically for Apple News in order to submit our news content.

Naturally, I've been going over the provided documentation after ensuring the feed is RSS 2.0 compliant to make sure that it is also compliant with Apple News:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/News_Publishing_Guide/RSSBestPractices.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40015407-CH13-SW1

The documentation makes sense overall, but there is one piece for which I can't find any clarification and I thought I'd reach out to the community here for answers.

Under the "Recommended Tags and Attributes" header, the page says, "For best results, include these tags in the HTML element of each article (where relevant)."

This may be a stupid question, but are they referring to a head element within the RSS feed or on the article page itself?

And would this mean Apple is going to crawl the pages present in the feed?

I ask mainly because they talk about OG Tags (which we have implemented) and I can't find relevant documentation about OG Tags within RSS feeds.

Vadim Kotov
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tdlm
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2 Answers2

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My hunch is that you should not create a specific RSS feed for Apple News, but improve your current RSS feeds to provide a better integration with Apple News and other feed consumers (Facebook, Flipboard, Google search, Feedly, Feedbin... etc).

RSS's magic comes from the fact that it decouple the publishing side (you) from the subscribing side (them) and this creates a leveled playfield where everyone can compete fairly.

As for the 'Recommended Tags and Attributes', you should implement these recommendations in your HTML documents, because Apple will also look at the HTML when they see new entries in your feed (many feed readers do as a matter of fact!).

Julien Genestoux
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    Understandable that you'd say we shouldn't create a specific feed, but we tailor our feeds on purpose. I get what you mean though. And we have implemented the recommendations on the HTML documents. What I was looking for is some proof that Apple will, in fact, scan the pages listed in the feed for the additional information mentioned in their documentation. – tdlm Sep 01 '15 at 20:10
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We've been looking at exactly the same problem. The answer is: put it in the HEAD section of your HTML file.

Apple definitely scrapes the HTML of each article, because we have had lead images pulled from the content of our article (different to the one provided as a thumbnail).

haz
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