[wp-hackers] User-friendly feeds

[jonner.1979671 at bloglines.com]

--- hackers at wordpress.org wrote:

Opera does not support client-side XSLT
though the latest version of 

> Opera does have some CSS type hacks that
create links out of elements. 

> Opera claims that client side XSLT is dangerous.
 My inexperience with 

> client-side XSLT lends me to ask: can you have both
XSLT and CSS style 

> declarations in the document?

> 



I'm not sure if
you can have both or not.  I could try it out and see.  The point i was making
in my initial suggestion was that adding a simple client side XSL transform
would enhance user-friendliness in the majority of browsers (recent versions
of IE and Mozilla) and would offer no degradation in user-experience to browsers
(like opera) that don't support it.  Of course a CSS solution would work in
more-or-less all browsers but would be much more limited in the things that
it could do.  For example, in an XSLT template, you could add additional text
describing what a syndication feed is and give links to various desktop or
web-based newsreaders, etc.  I'm not sure that this would be easy (or possible)
with CSS, as you'd likely have to use generated content (:before or :after
with content:"xxx";) which is not parsed by the browser.  So trying to provide
links to newsreader applications would simply result in the markup being written
literally to the page.  The workaround used by blogger is to insert extra
markup (a div) into their atom feed using a different xml namespace.  I'm
not sure how RSS uses namespaces, so I'm not sure if this is viable solution
for the other feed flavors.



By the way, I'd be willing to write up an XSLT
stylesheet if it was accepted as a feature.  I'm currently using a simple
one on my site, so it wouldn't be much work.  So is there a concensus from
'those-in-charge' as to (a) whether this would be accepted in principle and
(b) whether to go with a XSLT or CSS-based solution?



Jonathon



P.S. 
I can't imagine why somebody would deem client-side XSLT to be 'dangerous'.
 Poorly supported, maybe.  But dangerous??