[wp-hackers] Linking stylesheet to RSS feeds

Lynne Pope lynne.pope at gmail.com
Thu Jun 18 14:12:04 GMT 2009


2009/6/18 RePost <repost_08 at yahoo.com>

> Ryan McCue wrote:
>
>> On 17/06/2009 4:09 PM, Eric Marden wrote:
>>
>>> You can use both CSS and XSL/T to style RSS (which is just XML),
>>> including linking external style sheets.
>>>
>>
>> As I mentioned, this is only for viewing the feed in the browser, and it
>> doesn't actually display on Firefox (or Safari, from memory), as they have
>> their own XSLT styles. As far as I know, RePost wants to style it in an
>> aggregator (feed reader).
>>
>>  I'm glad to see a real conversation develop here. Hope it has some impact
> on future iterations of the WP RSS2 feed.
>
> I've never been happy with feed readers, but also never considered that my
> feed might display differently in feed readers vs. browsers.


That's the thing - feed readers and aggregators are not web browsers. They
expect to get plain content, not a web page and have their own user
interfaces for displaying the XML data they receive.

Even those aggregators that preserve XSL styling can usually be overridden
by user preferences so once your feed has been accessed by someone (or by an
app) there is really no control over how it is presented. The same is also
true for web pages actually - the styling we provide can be completely
changed by the person viewing our sites.

I've never used this plugin, but it might provide a starting point for
styling your feeds: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feed-styler/ It adds
inline styling.

Lynne


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