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RSS 2.0

<rss>

The root element of an RSS feed. It carries the version attribute and exactly one <channel>, and nothing else.

RSS has no namespace of its own — the core elements are unqualified, which is why extension modules like content: and itunes: have to declare theirs on this element. That absence is also why an RSS feed and an arbitrary XML file are told apart by root element name alone.

version="2.0" is the only version worth emitting. RSS 0.91 and 0.92 still exist in the wild, and their element sets differ enough that a reader written for 2.0 will quietly drop content.

Format
RSS 2.0
Namespace
None — RSS elements are unqualified
Parent
None — this is the document element
How many
Exactly one, as the document element.

What it contains

Attributes

  • versionrequired"2.0" for anything written today.

Cardinality and constraints

Exactly one, as the document element.

  • version="2.0" — required in practice, though readers vary in how strict they are.
  • Exactly one <channel> child, and no others.
  • Extension namespaces are declared here: content:, itunes:, atom: and the rest.

What our validator does

The feed validator warns when the version attribute is missing or is not 2.0, and errors when there is no <channel>.

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>
  <channel>
    <title>Example</title>
    <link>https://example.com/</link>
    <description>Notes from the example farm.</description>
    <item><title>Hen lays egg</title></item>
  </channel>
</rss>
<rss> has no version attribute. RSS 2.0 documents should carry version="2.0".
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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