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Atom 1.0

<title>

The human-readable name of a feed or entry, carrying a type attribute that says how to interpret its content.

Atom titles are text constructs: the optional type attribute is text, html or xhtml, and it changes what the content means. type="html" says the content is escaped HTML; type="xhtml" says it contains a real XHTML <div> as a child element rather than text.

Getting that wrong is how markup ends up displayed as tags, or tags end up displayed as markup. Omit the attribute and it defaults to text, which is the safe answer.

Format
Atom 1.0
Namespace
Atom Syndication Format 1.0
Parent
<feed><entry>
How many
Exactly one per <feed> and per <entry>.

What it contains

Nothing — this element holds a value rather than other elements. Its content is text, and the constraints below are what that text has to be.

Attributes

  • typeoptionaltext, html or xhtml. Defaults to text.

Cardinality and constraints

Exactly one per <feed> and per <entry>.

  • Required on both the feed and every entry — unlike RSS, there is no title-or-description alternative.
  • type is text (default), html, or xhtml.
  • With type="xhtml" the content is a real <div> element, not escaped text.

What our validator does

Presence and non-emptiness are checked on the feed and on every entry; the type attribute is not interpreted.

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.

broken
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b93c-0003939e0af6</id>
  <updated>2026-08-10T09:00:00Z</updated>
  <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>
<feed> is missing the required <title>. RFC 4287 requires all three.
fixed
<?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>
No errors. Warnings may remain — a conforming feed can still be missing a self link — but nothing here is wrong.

Where it reaches

Related elements

All 34 elements

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