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RSS 2.0

<title>

The name of the feed, or of an item. Required on the channel; on an item, required only if there is no description.

The same element name does two jobs. On a <channel> it is the feed's name and is required outright. On an <item> it is the headline, and the specification asks only that an item carry a title or a description — either one satisfies it.

It is plain text. Markup inside a title has to be escaped or wrapped in CDATA, and readers vary wildly in whether they then render it or show the tags.

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 <description>.
  • Plain text: escape markup, or wrap it in a CDATA section.

What our validator does

Checked for presence and non-emptiness on the channel, and paired with <description> on each item — an item with neither is an error naming the item's position.

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>Notes from the example farm.</description>
    <item><link>https://example.com/egg</link></item>
  </channel>
</rss>
entry 1 has neither <title> nor <description>; RSS requires at least one.
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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