RSS and Atom Feed Viewer

Paste the XML of an RSS or Atom feed and read it the way a feed reader would, without subscribing or fetching anything. The viewer auto-detects whether the document is RSS 2.0 (<rss><channel><item>) or Atom (<feed><entry>), shows the channel or feed title and description, then renders each item as a card with its title, published or updated date, author, a plain-text snippet of the summary, and its link shown as text. It does not fetch remote URLs, so paste the XML directly. Nothing is uploaded.

How to use the RSS and Atom Feed Viewer

Open the feed in your browser or fetch it with a tool you already use, copy the raw XML, and paste it into the box. The viewer parses it immediately and tells you whether it read the document as RSS or Atom, how many items it found, and the channel or feed title and description. You can also load a saved .xml, .rss, or .atom file with the file picker — the file is read locally and never sent anywhere.

Each article is rendered as a card sorted in the order the feed supplies, showing the title, the published or updated date in a readable form, the author or creator when present, a short text snippet with HTML stripped out, and the canonical link printed as plain text rather than a live hyperlink. Links are deliberately not clickable: this tool never opens or fetches a remote address for you, which keeps your reading private and sidesteps the browser cross-origin restrictions that block client-side fetching of most feeds anyway.

RSS and Atom: two ways to syndicate a feed

A feed is a machine-readable list of recent content — blog posts, news stories, podcast episodes — that lets software watch a site without scraping its HTML. Two formats dominate. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) grew out of late-1990s work at Netscape and UserLand; the widely used RSS 2.0 spec froze in 2003. Atom was designed a couple of years later as an IETF standard (RFC 4287) to fix ambiguities in RSS, and the two have coexisted ever since. Most feed readers accept both, which is why a viewer has to detect the format before it can read it.

Structurally they differ in naming and nesting. RSS wraps everything in <rss><channel> and lists posts as <item> elements with <title>, <link>, <description>, <pubDate> (an RFC 822 date), <guid>, and often a <dc:creator> from the Dublin Core namespace for the author. Atom uses <feed> with <entry> elements; its <link> is an attribute-carrying element with an href, dates are ISO 8601 in <updated> and <published>, the body lives in <summary> or <content>, the author sits in a structured <author><name>, and every entry needs a globally unique <id>.

Podcasts ride on RSS through enclosures: an <enclosure> element points at the audio or video file with a URL, length, and MIME type, and the iTunes namespace adds episode metadata. That single mechanism is why one syndication format underpins the entire podcast ecosystem. Feeds still matter in 2026 precisely because they are open and decentralized — no algorithm, no login, no tracking. They power podcast apps, newsreaders, automation pipelines, and aggregators, giving readers a way to follow sources directly that no closed platform can match.

Common use cases

• Inspect a feed. See exactly what items, dates, and links a site publishes before subscribing in a reader.
• Debug feed output. Confirm your generated RSS or Atom renders titles, dates, and summaries the way you expect.
• Read privately. Skim articles from XML you already have without any reader logging your activity.
• Check podcast feeds. Verify enclosures, item titles, and publish dates in a podcast feed's XML.
• Compare formats. Drop in RSS and Atom samples to learn how the same content maps across both standards.