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Comment by Maxious | Hacker News Reader

If you view an RSS or Atom feed in chrome today you just get a screen of xml eg. https://developer.wordpress.org/news/feed/

In the golden old days of 2018, browsers at least applied some styling https://evertpot.com/firefox-rss/

You can still manually apply styling using xslt https://www.cedricbonhomme.org/blog/index.xml

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In Safari at least clicking a rss link prompts you to open it in a rss reader, which I think is a superior experience. Reading a rss feed in browser is not without use, but I’d argue that that’s mostly the job of the site itself.

The sites sometimes want to provide some special formatting on top of the RSS without modifying it. For example, you might point people to available RSS readers which may not be installed or provide other directions to end users. RSS feeds are used in places other than reading apps. I've seen people suggest that this transformation could be done server-side, but that would modify the RSS feed which needs to be consumed.

> You can still manually apply styling using xslt

Unless I'm using XSLT without knowing, you can do this with the xml-stylesheet processing instruction

https://boehs.org/in/blog.xml

But XSLT is not strictly required for styling. In fact, Firefox also supports an out-of-band stylesheet inclusion via the `Link` HTTP header [1]:

    Link: </style.css>; rel=stylesheet

(Yes, this works even without <?xml-stylesheet?> PI others have mentioned.)

I think the best strategy for Google is to support this and simultaneously ditch XSLT. This way nothing is truly lost.

[1] You can test your browser from: https://annevankesteren.nl/test/html-element/style-header.ph...

> nothing is truly lost.

XSLT does much more than CSS.

Technically yes, but so what? The RSS use case is almost the only thing XSLT can uniquely provide (at the moment). Every other use case of XSLT can be done in other ways, including the use of server-side XSLT processors.

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