Atom 1.0
<entry>
One item in an Atom feed, with the same three required children as the feed itself and an author requirement it can inherit.
Every entry needs <id>, <title> and <updated>. It also needs an author, but that one may come from the feed: an entry with no <author> is valid as long as the feed has one, and invalid otherwise. That inheritance rule is the most commonly missed requirement in Atom.
An entry should also carry content or a summary — the specification requires a <summary> in the cases where <content> is absent or is a remote reference, which is a rule almost nobody implements deliberately.
- Format
- Atom 1.0
- Namespace
- Atom Syndication Format 1.0
- Parent
- <feed>
- How many
- Any number per <feed>, including none.
What our validator does
Each entry is checked for the three required children by position, and the feed-or-entry author rule is applied across the whole document.
Broken and fixed
Both documents below are well-formed XML — that is the point of this corpus — and both are run through the validator on every test run. The verdicts here are what it returned, not what we expect it to.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93c-0003939e0af6</id>
<title>Example</title>
<updated>2026-08-10T09:00:00Z</updated>
<author><name>Ada Lovelace</name></author>
<entry>
<title>Hen lays egg</title>
<updated>2026-08-10T09:00:00Z</updated>
</entry>
</feed>entry 1 is missing the required <id>.<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93c-0003939e0af6</id>
<title>Example</title>
<updated>2026-08-10T09:00:00Z</updated>
<link rel="self" href="https://example.com/feed.xml"/>
<author><name>Ada Lovelace</name></author>
<entry>
<id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id>
<title>Hen lays egg</title>
<updated>2026-08-10T09:00:00Z</updated>
</entry>
</feed>Where it reaches
- FormatsAtom 1.0The format page and the rest of the entry's children.
- ToolsRSS & Atom feed validatorNames the entry's position, which is how you find it.
- ToolsXML to CSV converterTurns entries into rows, one per entry.
Related elements
- <feed>The root element of an Atom document, and the one place the specification names three children as required rather than recommended.
- <id>A permanent, universally unique IRI for the feed or an entry. Required on both, and the element Atom is strictest about.
- <author>A person construct naming who wrote the feed or an entry — required at one level or the other, which is the rule most feeds break.
- <item>One entry in the feed. Every child is optional except that it must have a title or a description.
Get started
Bring order to the XML your team can't afford to ignore.
Create a free account and get a private workspace to search, validate, diff, and monitor your XML feeds, sitemaps, schemas, and vendor integrations.