RSS 2.0
<item>
One entry in the feed. Every child is optional except that it must have a title or a description.
The specification is unusually permissive here: all of an item's elements are optional, provided at least one of <title> and <description> is present. Everything a reader relies on — a link, an identifier, a date — is technically optional, which is exactly why feeds in the wild are missing them.
In practice an item wants four things: a title, a link, a stable <guid>, and an RFC 822 <pubDate>. Anything less and readers will either show duplicates or order the feed wrongly.
What our validator does
Items are counted, checked for the title-or-description rule, and their identifiers compared for duplicates. A channel with no items is a warning rather than an error.
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"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Example</title>
<link>https://example.com/</link>
<description>Notes from the example farm.</description>
<item><guid>https://example.com/egg</guid></item>
</channel>
</rss>entry 1 has neither <title> nor <description>; RSS requires at least one.<?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>Where it reaches
- FormatsRSS 2.0The format page, and how items sit inside the channel.
- ToolsXML to CSV converterTurns repeating items into rows, one per item.
- ToolsRSS & Atom feed validatorReports the position of each offending item.
Related elements
- <channel>The feed itself: three required children — title, link and description — and every item beneath them.
- <guid>An item's permanent identifier. Readers use it to tell a new item from one already shown — and a feed that changes it republishes everything.
- <pubDate>When an item was published, in RFC 822 — the date format that is not ISO 8601, and is the most common thing wrong in a feed.
- <entry>One item in an Atom feed, with the same three required children as the feed itself and an author requirement it can inherit.
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