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RSS 2.0

<atom:link>

An Atom element borrowed into RSS so a feed can name its own URL — the conventional way to declare rel="self".

RSS 2.0 has no element for a feed's own address, so the convention is to borrow Atom's. <atom:link rel="self" href="…"/> inside the channel tells readers and aggregators where the feed canonically lives, which matters as soon as a feed is mirrored, proxied, or moved.

It requires the Atom namespace to be declared on the <rss> element. Because it is a foreign element, nothing about RSS itself requires it — but every feed validator asks for it, and this one warns when it is absent.

Format
RSS 2.0
Namespace
Atom Syndication Format 1.0
Parent
<channel>
How many
One per <channel>, conventionally.

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

  • hrefrequiredThe feed's own canonical URL.
  • relrequired"self" for this use.
  • typeoptionalapplication/rss+xml, conventionally.

Cardinality and constraints

One per <channel>, conventionally.

  • Requires xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" on the root <rss> element.
  • rel="self" and an absolute href. Unlike RSS's own <link>, the URL is in the attribute.
  • Always an empty element.

What our validator does

The channel's links are scanned for one with rel="self", and its absence is reported as a warning.

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"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Example</title>
    <link>https://example.com/</link>
    <description>Notes from the example farm.</description>
    <item><title>Hen lays egg</title><guid>https://example.com/egg</guid></item>
  </channel>
</rss>
No <atom:link rel="self"> — readers use it to learn the feed's canonical URL.
fixed
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>Example</title>
    <link>https://example.com/</link>
    <description>Notes from the example farm.</description>
    <atom:link href="https://example.com/feed.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
    <item>
      <title>Hen lays egg</title>
      <link>https://example.com/egg</link>
      <guid>https://example.com/egg</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>
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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