Here's a revised proposal for a clarification to the RSS 2.0 spec.

Under Elements of <item>, replace the lead paragraph with the following.

A channel may contain any number of <item>s. An item may represent a "story" -- much like a story in a newspaper or magazine; if so its description is a synopsis of the story, and the link points to the full story. An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text (entity-encoded HTML is allowed; see examples), and the link and title may be omitted. All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present.

Notes: The new text is in green. The word examples links to a page of examples of encodings. We'd like to make the changes to the spec early next week.  If you have concerns about this change, please post a comment below, and we will review them before making the change. Thanks to everyone who has participated in the discussion thus far.

# Posted on 6/15/04; 11:12:32 PM -