Comment by chrismorgan
8 days ago
I am reminded of when Google attempted to kill MathML a few years ago because it was complexity and no one was using it (… because Chromium didn’t support it—all others did). There was widespread rebellion, and it actually led to Igalia implementing it and Google accepting and shipping it.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see a resurgence of interest in XSLT after this, if only for formatting Atom/RSS feeds.
(BTW, prefer Atom unless you’re operating in podcasting, it’s far more sane in ways that occasionally actually matter, and everything supports it except in podcasting which Apple ruined. If you want a featureful stylesheet to look at for reference, mine is the best I know of: https://chrismorgan.info/atom.xsl, https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-05-10-rss.xsl.)
I'd like to genuinely ask: what's the benefit of providing a visually appealing feed? I thought feeds were meant for programs. Do you/people directly browse individual feeds? Nice feed look BTW!
Most of the time you wouldn't even notice that a web page is the result of a client-side XSLT transformation, for example:
https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0182.xml
Some people aren’t familiar with auto discovery or feeds in general, so it’s desirable to have a link in your navigation that goes to your feed. When people click that link, they should see something useful and not just markup or a download prompt.