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Comment by Fileformat | Hacker News Reader

I always like to put a link to the RSS in the actual HTML (i.e. so a human can see it)

However, clicking it is horrible UX: a wall of text. Or even worse (shaking fist at Firefox), a download "Save as..." prompt.

So... <shameless self promotion> I made Feed.Style[0] to help people make it be a semi-presentable page by adding an XSLT stylesheet.</shame>

I have a couple of examples (of HN and high-ranking HNers natch ;) and found a fair number of bugs^H^H^H^H non-optimal choices in their feeds, probably because XML is not all that human-readable, even for devs.

Source [1] is MIT-licensed and is completely static, except for the examples, which are just an optional hack running on Cloudflare pages.

Feedback welcome!

[0] https://www.feed.style/

[1] https://github.com/fileformat/feed.style

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I've seen RSS styling before but it does feel like an oddity. I think I'm so used to the code view that when I see a styled feed page, it makes me wonder if I'm on the real URL. But at least the page does explain itself.

As a side note, it seems like a number of your "after" examples do not load. HN hug, or something else?

Hmm... The examples are running on the free tier of Cloudflare Pages Functions. I should be dramatically under any CPU/networking/transfer limits. And it should scale up as needed.

I just tried all of them now, and they did load. What is the exact error you are seeing? Just a blank page or ???

If you mean that the input box for "copy to clipboard" is empty, that's because the feed doesn't have a "self" link, which the stylesheet needs.

I'm not sure then. The first two "after" examples were blank for me. I tried again now and the first loaded, but second did not. After another few refreshes, it did load, though as you said the "copy and paste" link was blank.

I tried it in Firefox and got an XML parsing error[1] instead. Again refreshed and it loaded fine. So it seems intermittent at best.

[1] Error follows:

  XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: </link>.
  Location: https://www.feed.style/example.xml?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fshowrss
  Line Number 6, Column 3:

> I've seen RSS styling before but it does feel like an oddity. I think I'm so used to the code view that when I see a styled feed page, it makes me wonder if I'm on the real URL. But at least the page does explain itself.

Indeed, that was my greatest concern for adding a stylesheet to the RSS on my website. I tried to solve it by including a screenshot of the source tree :)

On my website, the RSS is announced through metadata only on the news page. Per the “Exposed RSS” statement, it should be linked from all pages? I wonder whether it really makes sense for someone to subscribe to a page without even checking it out on such a cursory level as to find the news page, though?

Probably needs something like how openrss.org does it. Shows a UX friendly view for RSS but gets picked up by RSS readers as well.

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