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RSS Needs CSS

Show Me The Styles

RSS1 is alllmost one of my favorite technologies. The potential is there, but it misses the mark.

Reading a post with nothing but text on an RSS reader is pretty much the same as reading it on a website. Add other content, though, and things start to fall apart.

Take this for example:

My apologies. The process I use to include alt text is currently broken. I'm working to get it fixed and hope to have it working again soon.

The left side is a browser. It's displaying a post with some beach photos. They've got a nice white border and plenty of spacing between them.

The right side is my RSS reader. It's showing the same post but there's no border on the images. Worse, there completely butted up against each other with no space between them.

Kinda make the page look like shit.

What's The Difference

The border around the photos and the spacing between them is done with CSS2. One of the three pillars on which web pages are built3.

That pillar is absent from RSS Readers4. They simply ignore CSS5.

As a techie, I get it. I understand what's happening. The CSS is stripped out for some reason probably having to do with security. Because of that, I've never given it a lot of critical thought. The more I think about the future of the web, the more that changes.

RSS has a fantastic potential for creating networks of websites that become their own social networks. But, if it looks like shit, no one is gonna use it.

RSS needs CSS.

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Endnotes

  • I expect adding CSS to the RSS ecosystem is a non-trivial task. It strikes me as one of those things where there's a bunch of non-obvious security concerns. That said, we have CSS in browsers, so it has to be addressable. Something I'll look into as I work on the web.

See Also

Footnotes

1 ⤴

Providing the power of feeds to websites.

2 ⤴

The way to change the appearance of a web page.

3 ⤴

The other two being HTML and JavaScript.

4 ⤴

JavaScript is also missing. I'm less worried about that though.

5 ⤴

I'm basing my experience here off of NetNewsWire which has been my go-to RSS reader app forever. I've seen minimal styling in a few feeds, but the list of available styles seems very limited. And, no one seem to even try in their feeds. For all intents an purposes, CSS doesn't exist.