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RSS 2.0

<link>

The URL of the site, or of an item — and, in RSS, an element whose text content is the URL rather than an href attribute.

RSS predates the convention Atom follows: here <link> holds the URL as text, with no attributes at all. That difference is the single most common bug when converting a feed between the two formats, because an Atom <link> carries its URL in href and has no text content.

On an item, <link> doubles as an identifier when no <guid> is present, which is why a feed with neither leaves readers unable to tell a new item from one they have shown before.

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>.

  • The URL is the element's text content. RSS <link> has no href attribute.
  • Absolute, and entity-escaped like any other URL in XML.
  • On an item it is the fallback identifier when <guid> is absent.

What our validator does

Required on the channel and reported when missing. On items it is read as a fallback identifier when no <guid> is present.

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>
    <description>Notes from the example farm.</description>
    <item><title>Hen lays egg</title></item>
  </channel>
</rss>
<channel> is missing the required <link>.
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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