After stumbling upon this post I decided to give XSLT a go.

A few examples

  1. Making my blog’s RSS feed look like my front page: This site’s RSS feed visually mimics its front page.

  2. Prettifying the output of my feed generator.

  3. Beautiful Podcast Feed with embedded episode player for my youtube to podcast project.

Some notes after playing with XSLT in a few projects:

  1. Styling your site’s feed to match your site’s appearance is trivial, but probably confusing when a user expects to have clicked on an RSS feed (thus the orange banner on this site’s feed).
  2. Poor support across browsers:
  • Safari appears ignores Content-type, doesn’t want to display the XML at all

  • Embedding the xsl file into the xml page is possible, and works on Firefox but not Chrome.

On Firefox this can be achieve easily:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="#rss-stylesheet"?>
<rss>
  ...
  <xsl:stylesheet id="rss-stylesheet">
    ...
  </xsl:stylesheet>
</rss>

But on Chrome it will only show a white page. Some background on why here.

  • Firefox does not support disable-output-escaping

This flag should prevent escaping of <> characters, allowing HTML from the feed’s content to be rendered. Firefox does not seem to be supporting, contrary to Chrome.

Note that if disable-output-escaping is off, <script> tags won’t get escaped either and Chrome will execute their content!

  • [0] - Style your RSS feed
  • [1] - Wikipedia - XSLT
  • [2] - RSS Banquet - A Modular Atom/RSS Feed Generator
  • [3] - Ydl-Podcast - A simple tool to generate Podcast like RSS feeds from youtube (or other youtube-dl supported services) channels, using youtube-dl
  • [4] - This blog’s RSS Feed
  • [5] - This blog’s RSS Feed’s XSLT template/stylesheet (which you will note is an XML file and could be, itself, styled…)