XML format

Atom 1.0

The IETF-standardised syndication format: namespaced, strictly typed, and unambiguous about dates.

Atom was designed to fix RSS 2.0's ambiguities. It is namespaced from the root, requires ISO 8601 dates, and makes content typing explicit through a type attribute rather than by convention.

It is stricter in ways that matter for tooling: a feed must carry an <id>, a <title> and an <updated>, and each entry must too. That makes Atom considerably easier to consume programmatically, which is why many APIs still emit it.

Constraints that bite

Feed and every entry require id, title and updated.
Dates are RFC 3339 (ISO 8601), not RFC 822 — the opposite of RSS.
<id> must be a permanent, globally unique IRI, not the current page URL.
A feed should include <link rel="self"> pointing at its own canonical location.
Content type is declared explicitly: type="text", "html" or "xhtml".

Root element: <feed>
Media type: application/atom+xml
Extensions: .xml, .atom
Namespaces: http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom
XMLDir label: atom

Specification: RFC 4287

A minimal valid document

Every example on this site is checked against the same parser the workspace uses, so what you see below is known to be well-formed.

atom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <id>urn:uuid:8f1b0c9e-1d3a-4a1f-9d2b-6f0a3c5e7b11</id>
  <title>Example feed</title>
  <updated>2026-07-20T09:00:00Z</updated>
  <link rel="self" href="https://example.com/atom.xml"/>
  <entry>
    <id>https://example.com/first</id>
    <title>First post</title>
    <updated>2026-07-20T09:00:00Z</updated>
  </entry>
</feed>

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