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RSS 2.0

<channel>

The feed itself: three required children — title, link and description — and every item beneath them.

A <channel> is the whole feed's metadata and its contents in one element. The specification requires <title>, <link> and <description>; everything else, including the items, is optional, so a feed with no items is conformant and useless.

Because items are children of the channel rather than a separate container, the ordering convention matters for readability rather than validity: metadata first, items last.

Format
RSS 2.0
Namespace
None — RSS elements are unqualified
Parent
<rss>
How many
Exactly one per <rss>.

What it contains

Cardinality and constraints

Exactly one per <rss>.

  • <title>, <link> and <description> are all required and all must be non-empty.
  • Items are children of the channel, not of a wrapper element.
  • A channel with no items is valid RSS and carries nothing.

What our validator does

Each of the three required children is checked for presence and non-emptiness, and a missing one is an error naming the element.

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>
    <item><title>Hen lays egg</title></item>
  </channel>
</rss>
<channel> is missing the required <description>.
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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