Question

I notice that feeds have these elements both at the top feed level and the feed item level:

<feed>
  <author> ... </author>
  <category> ... </category>

  <item>
    <author> ... </author>
    <category> ... </category>
  </item>

  ...

Do the ones at the feed level have to match the ones from the item level?

Answer 1

They do not have to be the same.

Think of it like a anthology of horror stories. At the top level you have the editor and at each <item> level you have the author of an individual story. Sometimes these can be the same if the editor is also the author of an item, as they usually are on single author blogs.

<author> sub-element of <item>

It’s the email address of the author of the item. For newspapers and magazines syndicating via RSS, the author is the person who wrote the article that the <item> describes. For collaborative weblogs, the author of the item might be different from the managing editor or webmaster. For a weblog authored by a single individual it would make sense to omit the <author> element.

This is the same with the <category> element. At the top it describes the whole feed against other feeds/sites in the wild. On each item it would be compared to the other posts on the site.

There is no <author> tag at the high channel level. Instead you should use either <managingEditor> or <webMaster> elements as part of a valid RSS feed.

If you’re worried about putting email addresses out there in these elements, you can skip the <author> element completely since it’s optional and doesn’t impact the well-formed validation of your RSS.