Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one.

"XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into something that can still be viewed."

You could use content negotiation just fine. I just hit my personal rss.xml file, and the browser sent this as the Accept header:

    text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;
    q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8

except it has no newline, which I added for HN.

You can easily ship out an HTML rendering of an RSS file based on this. You can have your server render an XSLT if you must. You can have your server send out some XSLT implemented in JS that will come along at some point.

To a first approximation, nobody cares enough to use content negotiation any more than anyone cares about providing XML stylesheets. The tech isn't the problem, the not caring is... and the not caring isn't actually that big a problem either. It's been that way for a long time and we aren't actually all that bothered about it. It's just a "wouldn't it be nice" that comes up on those rare occasions like this when it's the topic of conversation and doesn't cross anyone's mind otherwise.

You've been in the RSS world since the beginning and never seen a stylized feed?

I've not been in the RSS world very much. I don't use news readers. And even I have seen a stylized RSS in the wild.

Our individual experiences are of course anecdotal, I'm just surprised at how different they are given your background.

> nor have I seen one.

Once upon a time, nice in-browser rendering of RSS/Atom feeds complete with search and sorting was a headliner feature of Safari.

https://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_subscribe_to_rss_feed...

Another point: it is shocking how many feeds have errors in them. I analyzed the feeds of some of the top contributors on HN, and almost all had something wrong with them.

Even RSS wizards would benefit from looking at a human-readable version instead of raw XML.

I ended up writing a feed analyzer that you can try on your feed: https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html

> I analyzed the feeds of some of the top contributors on HN, and almost all had something wrong with them.

I’m sceptical about your analysis, because your tool makes spurious complaints about my feed <https://chrismorgan.info/feed.xml> which show that it’s not parsing XML correctly. For stupid reasons¹ that I decided not to fix or work around, many of the slashes are encoded as /, which is perfectly valid, but your tool fails to decode the character references inside attribute values. I don’t know what dodgy parser you’re using, it’s possible this is the only thing it gets wrong about parsing XML², but it doesn’t instil confidence. I would expect a strict XML parser to be more reliable. I’ve literally only once encountered a feed that was invalid XML³. Liberal parsing is not a virtue, it’s fragile in a different way. Postel was wrong.

—⁂—

¹ I wish OWASP’s XSS protection cheat sheet had never been written. I will say no more.

² Honestly, parsing XML isn’t very hard; once you’re past the prologue, there are literally only about seven simple concepts to deal with (element, attribute, text, processing instructions, comments, cdata, character/entity references), with straightforward interactions. Not decoding references in attribute values is a mind-boggling oversight to me.

³ WordPress thinks it’s okay to encode U+0003 as  in an XML 1.0 document.

I think it used to be more popular in early days. At one point i think firefox was styling rss feeds by default so people stopped using xslt as much.

You can still style them with css if you want. I dont really see the point. RSS is for machines to read not humans.

there's a fairly good chance that you simply haven't noticed, because it was working as intended, e.g. https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824952

That's my point: you know all about RSS & feeds and don't need it. But what about someone who hasn't been using them since the beginning?

I think every page with an RSS feed should have a link to the feed in the html body. And it should be friendly to people who are not RSS wizards.

The phrase you are looking for to describe this discourse is “concern trolling.”

> I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one.

Maybe it's more for people who have no idea what RSS is and click on the intriguing icon. If they weren't greeted with a load of what seems like nonsense for nerds there could have been broader adoption of RSS.

> If they weren't greeted with a load of what seems like nonsense for nerds there could have been broader adoption of RSS.

Why? Wouldn't just see a different view of the same website that had that intriguing icon and go "ok, so what?"

If they don't know what an RSS feed is, seeing a stylized version isn't really going to help them understand, imho.

You can add text to the document via XSL which can be used to explain what you're looking at and how to use it.

See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...

> I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one.

So that excludes you from the "someone who hasn't seen/used a RSS reader" demographic mentioned in the comment you are replying to.

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