XML format
RSS 2.0
The most widely deployed syndication format: namespace-free at its core, extension-heavy in practice, and unopinionated about almost everything.
RSS 2.0 is unusual among XML formats in declaring no namespace of its own: <rss version="2.0"> and its children are unqualified. Everything beyond the basics arrives as an imported namespace — Atom for a self link, the content module for full HTML bodies, iTunes for podcast metadata.
That design makes RSS forgiving to write and awkward to validate. Two feeds can both be correct RSS and share almost no elements, so consuming feeds reliably means inspecting the structure a publisher actually emits rather than trusting the spec.
Constraints that bite
- The version attribute must be "2.0"; RSS 1.0 is a different format with an <rdf:RDF> root.
- <channel> requires title, link and description; items require at least a title or a description.
- pubDate must be RFC 822, not ISO 8601 — a common source of silently ignored dates.
- HTML in <description> must be escaped or wrapped in CDATA; raw markup makes the feed malformed.
- <author> is specified to hold an email address, which is why bylines usually use <dc:creator>.
- Root element
<rss>- Media type
application/rss+xml- Extensions
.xml, .rss- Namespaces
- None — unqualified elements
- XMLDir label
rss
Specification: RSS 2.0 specification
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.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>Example feed</title>
<link>https://example.com/</link>
<description>Latest posts</description>
<atom:link href="https://example.com/rss.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
<item>
<title>First post</title>
<link>https://example.com/first</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://example.com/first</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>Namespaces you will meet
Atom Syndication Format 1.0
http://www.w3.org/2005/AtomThe namespace for Atom feeds, and for the <atom:link rel="self"> element that well-formed RSS feeds borrow to point at their own URL.
RSS content module
http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/Supplies <content:encoded>, the element feeds use to carry a full HTML article body when RSS's own <description> holds only a summary.
Dublin Core (elements 1.1)
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/Fifteen general-purpose metadata terms — creator, date, title, subject, rights and friends — reused inside RSS, RDF and publishing formats alike.
iTunes podcast extension
http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtdThe de facto podcast vocabulary: episode and season numbers, artwork, categories, explicit flags and durations. Every major directory reads it.
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