RSS 2.0

<description>

The feed's summary, or an item's body. Required on the channel, and the element where HTML inside XML becomes a problem.

On a channel it is a phrase or sentence describing the feed. On an item it is the content — a summary or the whole article — and because it is plain text, embedded HTML must be escaped or wrapped in CDATA.

That escaping is why content:encoded exists. A feed carrying full articles usually puts a short summary in <description> and the HTML body in <content:encoded>, where readers know to expect markup.

Format: RSS 2.0
Namespace: None — RSS elements are unqualified
Parent: <channel><item>
How many: One per <channel>; at most one per <item>.

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.

Cardinality and constraints

One per <channel>; at most one per <item>.

Required and non-empty on the channel.
On an item, required only when there is no <title>.
HTML must be escaped or wrapped in a CDATA section — the element is plain text either way.

What our validator does

Presence and non-emptiness are checked on the channel, and the title-or-description rule is applied to each item.

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>  </description>
    <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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