Reference
Public XML endpoints
31 real documents you can fetch right now, across 7 categories. Every one was fetched and read before it was listed, and each is re-checked daily — nothing here is a URL somebody remembered.
Link rot reports itself
A directory is only worth keeping if it stays true, so this one checks. Each endpoint is fetched daily and the result recorded; three consecutive failures delist an entry, and the page says so rather than leaving a dead link looking healthy. Being too large to snapshot is tracked separately — that is our five megabyte cap, not their outage.Standards bodies · 6
- The XML Schema schemawww.w3.orgThe schema for schemas: XSD's own grammar, written in XSD, at the URI every schema document declares as its namespace.
- The sitemaps.org 0.9 schemawww.sitemaps.orgThe normative grammar for a sitemap — the one that says changefreq has eight permitted values and priority is capped at 1.0.
- The RFC indexwww.rfc-editor.orgEvery RFC ever published, with authors, dates, status and the obsoletes/updates graph between them — as one XML document.
- IANA media type registrywww.iana.orgThe authoritative list of registered media types, including the application/xml and +xml conventions this whole site depends on.
- CLDR locale data for Englishraw.githubusercontent.comHow English formats dates, numbers, currencies and names — the locale data almost every operating system and language runtime is built on.
- GML 3.2.1 schemaschemas.opengis.netThe entry point to the Geography Markup Language grammar — the schema most geospatial XML you will meet is validated against.
Government and public sector · 7
- New UK legislation feedwww.legislation.gov.ukEvery piece of UK legislation as it is published, as an Atom feed — with the legislation itself available as XML behind each entry.
- Federal Register documentswww.federalregister.govRules, proposed rules and notices from US federal agencies, published continuously as RSS.
- Most-viewed billswww.congress.govWhat people are actually reading on congress.gov this week, as a small, well-behaved RSS feed.
- European Commission press releasesec.europa.euPress releases, statements and speeches from the Commission, with a language parameter that changes the whole feed.
- data.gov sitemapwww.data.govThe sitemap for the US open data catalogue — a plain urlset rather than an index, which is unusual at this scale.
- GOV.UK sitemap indexwww.gov.ukA textbook sitemap index: a short file pointing at the child sitemaps that carry the actual URLs.
- Canada.ca sitemapwww.canada.caA single urlset far past every size the protocol recommends — 50 MB of it, which is the limit rather than a margin below it.
Package registries · 4
- Maven metadata: commons-lang3repo1.maven.orgEvery published version of one of the most-depended-on Java libraries, in the file every build tool reads to resolve a version range.
- Maven metadata: slf4j-apirepo1.maven.orgThe same file for a library with a much longer release history — useful for seeing how these documents grow.
- PyPI newest updatespypi.orgThe most recently updated packages on PyPI, as RSS — a feed that changes several times a minute.
- PyPI releases: requestspypi.orgRelease history for a single package as a feed — the per-project shape of the same endpoint family.
News and media · 6
- BBC Newsfeeds.bbci.co.ukOne of the longest-running public RSS feeds on the web, and a reliable reference for what a conventional RSS 2.0 document looks like.
- New York Times front pagerss.nytimes.comA large, extension-heavy news feed — Dublin Core, media, and per-item categories on top of the RSS core.
- NPR newsfeeds.npr.orgA broadcaster's feed carrying audio enclosures alongside text items.
- Hacker News front pagenews.ycombinator.comAbout as small as a useful RSS feed gets: a title, a link, a comments link, and nothing else.
- Ars Technicafeeds.arstechnica.comA full-content feed: whole articles delivered inside content:encoded rather than a summary and a link.
- The Changelogchangelog.comA long-running podcast feed with the full iTunes vocabulary — and large enough to show what a decade of episodes does to a feed.
Science and measurement · 4
- Earthquakes, past hourearthquake.usgs.govEvery earthquake detected worldwide in the last hour, as Atom with georss coordinates on each entry.
- NCBI E-utilities database listeutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.govThe index of every database E-utilities can query — the first call anybody makes against PubMed's API, and it answers in XML.
- arXiv computer scienceexport.arxiv.orgNew computer science preprints, as an RSS feed large enough to be a real test — several megabytes of abstracts.
- NOAA tide observationstidesandcurrents.noaa.govThe latest water level from a single tide station, in about two hundred bytes — the smallest useful XML document in this directory.
Sitemaps in the wild · 3
- MDN Web Docs sitemap indexdeveloper.mozilla.orgA small index pointing at one child sitemap per locale — the clearest example of splitting a sitemap by something other than size.
- BBC sitemap indexwww.bbc.co.ukA very small index for a very large site — proof that an index says nothing about the size of what it points at.
- Guardian news sitemapwww.theguardian.comA Google News sitemap: recent articles only, each carrying the news extension with a publication and a publication date.
Want to know what one of these documents is made of before you fetch it? The format reference covers the shapes, and the element reference covers what is inside them.
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