Understand xml parsing in Apple sample code - ios

Question

I'm studying Apple's LazyTableImages sample code. I'd like to understand how the app is pulling data from the RSS feed included in the app:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/toppaidapplications/limit=75/xml
How are the contents at the above url parsed? Viewing the page source reveals HTML with no apparent xml section. While looking through the sample parsing code I found a few symbols like im:name. However these symbols are not in the contents of the above url.
I tried to host the contents of the above url locally (w/ limit=1). However pointing the sample code to #"~/Desktop/a.xml" causes the application to throw the error unsupported url.
More info: While reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss I came across what I expected to see at phobos link above. Something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>RSS Title</title>
<description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description>
<link>http://www.someexamplerssdomain.com/main.html</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>
<item>
<title>Example entry</title>
<description>an interesting description</description>
<link>http://www.wikipedia.org/</link>
<guid>unique string per item</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Is there an equivalent "human-readable" xml document corresponding to the above phobos link somewhere?

Answer 1

You're right, the feed you're looking at technically isn't an RSS Feed. It's an Atom 1.0 Feed, but both are popular XML-based feed formats.
If you view the source of the feed you will see the XML elements you're looking for, like:
<entry>
<updated>2011-12-09T16:15:32-07:00</updated>
<id>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tetris/id479943969?mt=8&uo=2</id>
<title>TETRIS® - Electronic Arts</title>
<summary>Long summary here</summary>
<im:name>TETRIS®</im:name>
...
</entry>
Some browser versions parse RSS/Atom feeds into user-friendly HTML pages and present them instead of the actual feed, it sounds like that's the type of HTML page you're viewing.
On a OS X, you could use a command like Curl to download the feed in a Terminal:
curl -o feed.xml http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/toppaidapplications/limit=75/xml