8 ms·

One extremely important XSLT use-case is for RSS/Atom feeds. Right now, clicking on a link to feed brings up a wall of XML (or worse, a download link). If the f

One extremely important XSLT use-case is for RSS/Atom feeds. Right now, clicking on a link to feed brings up a wall of XML (or worse, a download link). If the feed has an XSLT stylesheet, it can be presented in a way that a newcomer can understand and use. I realize that not that many feeds are actually doing this, but that's because feed authors are tech-savvy and know what to do with an RSS/Atom link. But someone who hasn't seen/used an RSS reader will see a wall of plain-text gibberish (or a prompt to download the wall of gibberish). XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into something that can still be viewed. I think RSS/Atom are key technologies for the open web, and discovery is extremely important. Cancelling XSLT is going in the wrong direction (IMHO). I've done a bunch of things to try to get people to use XSLT in their feeds: https://www.rss.style/ https://www.rss.style/ You can see it in action on an RSS feed here (served as real XML, not HTML: do view/source): https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml

yegle 11mo ago
FWIW the original post explicitly mentioned this use case and offered two ways to workaround.
- Fileformat 11mo ago
  Gotta love the reference to the <link> header element. There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too.
  - jeffbee 11mo ago
    Man, reaching way back in history here, but this reminds me of why I stopped contributing to Mozilla decades ago. My contribution was the link toolbar, that was supposed to give a UI representation of the canonical link elements like next and prev and whatnot. At the last minute before a major release some jerkhole of a product manager at AOL cut my feature from the release. It's incredible the way such pretty bureaucrats have shaped web browsers over the years.
    - shadowgovt 11mo ago
      Good user-facing software tends to have a coherent vision, and that involves getting features cut that people put a lot of time and effort into; even though those features have value, it's possible they don't have value in the product under development. I don't really have enough context to say whether that was the case here. Mostly I'm raising the comment to note that this is an issue in commercial software too, but the sting is immediately moderated by "At least you got paid." It's a lot easier to see one's work fail to be reflected in the finished product when you can dry your tears with the bills in your money-pile (and I don't know how open source competes in things as cut-throat and taste-opinionated as UI when that continues to be true without solving the problem by injecting money into the process, which carries its own risks).
      - throwaway290 11mo ago
        It's a browser. its job is render HTML if a fix renders HTML better and more complete it should be done. it is always possible to make it configurable or change it later. instead mozilla is pushing anti-web llm integrations.
  - cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
    > There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too. This is actually a feature of Orion[0], and among the reasons why I believe it to be one of the most (power) user-oriented browsers in active development. It's such a basic thing that there's really no good reason to remove the feature outright (as mainstream browsers have), especially when the cited reason is to "reduce clutter" which has been added back tenfold with garbage like chatbots and shopping assistants. [0]: https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/
- lunar_mycroft 11mo ago
  iIRC, all of the proposed workarounds involved updating the sites using XSLT, which may not always be particularly easy, or even something publishers will realize they need to do.
- fevangelou 11mo ago
  Here's a 3rd option :) For RSS/Atom feeds presented as links in a site (for convenience to users), developers can always offer a simple preview for the feed output using: https://feedreader.xyz/ https://feedreader.xyz/ Just URL-encode the feed like so: https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2Frss%2Findex.xml https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2... ...and you get a nice preview that's human readable.
jerf 11mo ago
I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one. "XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into something that can still be viewed." You could use content negotiation just fine. I just hit my personal rss.xml file, and the browser sent this as the Accept header: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8 except it has no newline, which I added for HN. You can easily ship out an HTML rendering of an RSS file based on this. You can have your server render an XSLT if you must. You can have your server send out some XSLT implemented in JS that will come along at some point. To a first approximation, nobody cares enough to use content negotiation any more than anyone cares about providing XML stylesheets. The tech isn't the problem, the not caring is... and the not caring isn't actually that big a problem either. It's been that way for a long time and we aren't actually all that bothered about it. It's just a "wouldn't it be nice" that comes up on those rare occasions like this when it's the topic of conversation and doesn't cross anyone's mind otherwise.
- zamalek 11mo ago
  > I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one. So that excludes you from the "someone who hasn't seen/used a RSS reader" demographic mentioned in the comment you are replying to.
- doctorpangloss 11mo ago
  The phrase you are looking for to describe this discourse is “concern trolling.”
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  > nor have I seen one. Once upon a time, nice in-browser rendering of RSS/Atom feeds complete with search and sorting was a headliner feature of Safari. https://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_subscribe_to_rss_feeds_with_safari/ https://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_subscribe_to_rss_feed...
- bawolff 11mo ago
acabal 11mo ago
We do the same with our feeds at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases The page is XML but styled with XSLT.
chuckadams 11mo ago
> Cancelling XSLT is going in the wrong direction (IMHO). XSLT isn't going anywhere: hardwiring into the browser an implementation that's known to be insecure and is basically unmaintained is what's going away. The people doing the wailing/rending/gnashing about the removal of libxslt needed to step up to fix and maintain it. It seems like something an extension ought to be capable of, and if not, fix the extension API so it can. In firefox I think it would be a full-blown plugin, which is a lower-level thing than an extension, but I don't know whether Chromium even has a concept of such a thing.
- Kwpolska 11mo ago
  Or perhaps the multi-billion-dollar corporations could stop piggy-backing on volunteers and invest in maintaining the Web platform?
  - robocat 11mo ago
    Which popular browsers are significantly leaning on individual contributors or volunteers?
    - Kwpolska 11mo ago
      Google decided to drop XSLT, because the volunteer-maintained libxslt had no maintainers for some time. So, instead of helping the project, they just decided to remove a feature.
      - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
        But by (attempting to) remove this dependency, Google indeed decided to stop piggy-backing on another volunteer - as requested. Be careful what you wish for. :-)
    - mhitza 11mo ago
      Almost all of them? as I recall there was a single volunteer developer maintaining the xml/xslt libraries they were using. Wasn't it similar with openssl 13+ years ago? Few volunteer maintainers, and only after a couple of major vulnerabilities money got thrown at that project? I'm sure there's more and that's why the famous xkcd comic is always of relevance.
chrisweekly 11mo ago
Another use case I discovered and implemented many years ago was styling a sitemap.xml for improved UX / aesthetics.
AlecSchueler 11mo ago
> not that many feeds are actually doing this Isn't this kind of an argument for dropping it? Yeah it would be great if it was in use but even the people who are clicking and providing RSS feeds don't seem to care that much.
- Fileformat 11mo ago
  You are probably right, but it is depressing how techies don't see the big picture & don't want to provide an on-ramp to the RSS/Atom world for newcomers.
  - wryoak 11mo ago
    Google is widely faulted with effectively killing RSS by pulling the plug on Reader (I, for example, haven’t used RSS since), so I don’t think they’re missing the big picture, I think they just prefer a different picture
    - pjmlp 11mo ago
      I never got the backslash with Reader, having always used native apps to handle RSS.
      - wryoak 11mo ago
        Native apps are always better, but having a web page syncing your feeds made it easier to access them, eg from the library or work computer. Not to mention nothing to install (or update) reduces friction. I didn’t have to stop using RSS, but the newly exposed hurdles were enough discouragement that I did stop
    - shadowgovt 11mo ago
      It's probably worth considering that if the technology could be killed by one company pulling its chips off the board, perhaps the technology wasn't standing on its own. We still use RSS and Atom feeds for podcasts. It's a pretty widely-adopted use case. Perhaps there is a lot more to the contraction of RSS as a way for discovering publishing of "blog"-style media than "Reader got killed" (it seems like Reader offered more features than just RSS consolidation that someone could, hypothetically, build... But nobody has yet?).
geocar 11mo ago
> One extremely important... Not to downplay what you think is important, but I think it's pretty important that governments and public bodies use XSLT. https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih.xml https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih.... https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr400ih/xml/BILLS-119hr400ih.xml https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr400ih/xml/BIL... https://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KABE.xml https://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KABE.xml https://www.europarl.europa.eu/politicalparties/index_en.xml https://www.europarl.europa.eu/politicalparties/index_en.xml https://apps.tga.gov.au/downloads/sequence-description.xml https://apps.tga.gov.au/downloads/sequence-description.xml https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/downloads/fwi_obs/WeatherStations_CWFIS_export.xml https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/downloads/fwi_obs/WeatherStati... https://converters.eionet.europa.eu/xmlfile/EPRTR_MethodTypeCode_1.xml https://converters.eionet.europa.eu/xmlfile/EPRTR_MethodType... They don't put ads on their sites, so I'm not surprised Google doesn't give a fuck about them...
- jiggawatts 11mo ago
  > “They don't put ads on their sites, so I'm not surprised…” Similarly, Chrome regularly breaks or outright drops support for web features used only in private enterprise networks. Think NTLM or Kerberos authentication, private CA revocation list checking, that kind of thing. Again, nobody uses Google Ads on internal apps!
- cedilla 11mo ago
  Many governments and public bodies used Flash, ActiveX and Java applets, but I'm certainly glad we got rid of those.
  - al_be_back 11mo ago
    Replaced them with App stores, why one code base when you can have N code bases: web sites, ios, android , tv … cheaper, privacy-oriented and more secure lol obviously not, doesn’t help the consumer or the developer. Xslt is brilliant at transforming raw data, a tree or table for example, without having to install Office apps or paying a number of providers to simply view it without massive disruption loops.
thesuitonym 11mo ago
I never realized styling RSS feeds was an options. Now looking at some of the examples, I wonder how many times I've clicked on "Feed", then rolled my eyes and closed it because I thought it wasn't RSS. More than zero, I'm sure.
behringer 11mo ago
It's the right direction if you're google. This is why Google should not be allowed to control the web. Support firefox, dump google.

yegle 11mo ago

FWIW the original post explicitly mentioned this use case and offered two ways to workaround.

Fileformat 11mo ago
Gotta love the reference to the <link> header element. There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too.
- jeffbee 11mo ago
  Man, reaching way back in history here, but this reminds me of why I stopped contributing to Mozilla decades ago. My contribution was the link toolbar, that was supposed to give a UI representation of the canonical link elements like next and prev and whatnot. At the last minute before a major release some jerkhole of a product manager at AOL cut my feature from the release. It's incredible the way such pretty bureaucrats have shaped web browsers over the years.
  - shadowgovt 11mo ago
    Good user-facing software tends to have a coherent vision, and that involves getting features cut that people put a lot of time and effort into; even though those features have value, it's possible they don't have value in the product under development. I don't really have enough context to say whether that was the case here. Mostly I'm raising the comment to note that this is an issue in commercial software too, but the sting is immediately moderated by "At least you got paid." It's a lot easier to see one's work fail to be reflected in the finished product when you can dry your tears with the bills in your money-pile (and I don't know how open source competes in things as cut-throat and taste-opinionated as UI when that continues to be true without solving the problem by injecting money into the process, which carries its own risks).
    - throwaway290 11mo ago
      It's a browser. its job is render HTML if a fix renders HTML better and more complete it should be done. it is always possible to make it configurable or change it later. instead mozilla is pushing anti-web llm integrations.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  > There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too. This is actually a feature of Orion[0], and among the reasons why I believe it to be one of the most (power) user-oriented browsers in active development. It's such a basic thing that there's really no good reason to remove the feature outright (as mainstream browsers have), especially when the cited reason is to "reduce clutter" which has been added back tenfold with garbage like chatbots and shopping assistants. [0]: https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/
lunar_mycroft 11mo ago
iIRC, all of the proposed workarounds involved updating the sites using XSLT, which may not always be particularly easy, or even something publishers will realize they need to do.
fevangelou 11mo ago
Here's a 3rd option :) For RSS/Atom feeds presented as links in a site (for convenience to users), developers can always offer a simple preview for the feed output using: https://feedreader.xyz/ https://feedreader.xyz/ Just URL-encode the feed like so: https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2Frss%2Findex.xml https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2... ...and you get a nice preview that's human readable.

jerf 11mo ago

I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one. "XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into something that can still be viewed." You could use content negotiation just fine. I just hit my personal rss.xml file, and the browser sent this as the Accept header: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8 except it has no newline, which I added for HN. You can easily ship out an HTML rendering of an RSS file based on this. You can have your server render an XSLT if you must. You can have your server send out some XSLT implemented in JS that will come along at some point. To a first approximation, nobody cares enough to use content negotiation any more than anyone cares about providing XML stylesheets. The tech isn't the problem, the not caring is... and the not caring isn't actually that big a problem either. It's been that way for a long time and we aren't actually all that bothered about it. It's just a "wouldn't it be nice" that comes up on those rare occasions like this when it's the topic of conversation and doesn't cross anyone's mind otherwise.

zamalek 11mo ago
> I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one. So that excludes you from the "someone who hasn't seen/used a RSS reader" demographic mentioned in the comment you are replying to.
doctorpangloss 11mo ago
The phrase you are looking for to describe this discourse is “concern trolling.”
cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
> nor have I seen one. Once upon a time, nice in-browser rendering of RSS/Atom feeds complete with search and sorting was a headliner feature of Safari. https://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_subscribe_to_rss_feeds_with_safari/ https://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_subscribe_to_rss_feed...
bawolff 11mo ago

acabal 11mo ago

We do the same with our feeds at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases The page is XML but styled with XSLT.

chuckadams 11mo ago

> Cancelling XSLT is going in the wrong direction (IMHO). XSLT isn't going anywhere: hardwiring into the browser an implementation that's known to be insecure and is basically unmaintained is what's going away. The people doing the wailing/rending/gnashing about the removal of libxslt needed to step up to fix and maintain it. It seems like something an extension ought to be capable of, and if not, fix the extension API so it can. In firefox I think it would be a full-blown plugin, which is a lower-level thing than an extension, but I don't know whether Chromium even has a concept of such a thing.

Kwpolska 11mo ago
Or perhaps the multi-billion-dollar corporations could stop piggy-backing on volunteers and invest in maintaining the Web platform?
- robocat 11mo ago
  Which popular browsers are significantly leaning on individual contributors or volunteers?
  - Kwpolska 11mo ago
    Google decided to drop XSLT, because the volunteer-maintained libxslt had no maintainers for some time. So, instead of helping the project, they just decided to remove a feature.
    - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
      But by (attempting to) remove this dependency, Google indeed decided to stop piggy-backing on another volunteer - as requested. Be careful what you wish for. :-)
  - mhitza 11mo ago
    Almost all of them? as I recall there was a single volunteer developer maintaining the xml/xslt libraries they were using. Wasn't it similar with openssl 13+ years ago? Few volunteer maintainers, and only after a couple of major vulnerabilities money got thrown at that project? I'm sure there's more and that's why the famous xkcd comic is always of relevance.

chrisweekly 11mo ago

Another use case I discovered and implemented many years ago was styling a sitemap.xml for improved UX / aesthetics.

AlecSchueler 11mo ago

> not that many feeds are actually doing this Isn't this kind of an argument for dropping it? Yeah it would be great if it was in use but even the people who are clicking and providing RSS feeds don't seem to care that much.

Fileformat 11mo ago
You are probably right, but it is depressing how techies don't see the big picture & don't want to provide an on-ramp to the RSS/Atom world for newcomers.
- wryoak 11mo ago
  Google is widely faulted with effectively killing RSS by pulling the plug on Reader (I, for example, haven’t used RSS since), so I don’t think they’re missing the big picture, I think they just prefer a different picture
  - pjmlp 11mo ago
    I never got the backslash with Reader, having always used native apps to handle RSS.
    - wryoak 11mo ago
      Native apps are always better, but having a web page syncing your feeds made it easier to access them, eg from the library or work computer. Not to mention nothing to install (or update) reduces friction. I didn’t have to stop using RSS, but the newly exposed hurdles were enough discouragement that I did stop
  - shadowgovt 11mo ago
    It's probably worth considering that if the technology could be killed by one company pulling its chips off the board, perhaps the technology wasn't standing on its own. We still use RSS and Atom feeds for podcasts. It's a pretty widely-adopted use case. Perhaps there is a lot more to the contraction of RSS as a way for discovering publishing of "blog"-style media than "Reader got killed" (it seems like Reader offered more features than just RSS consolidation that someone could, hypothetically, build... But nobody has yet?).

geocar 11mo ago

> One extremely important... Not to downplay what you think is important, but I think it's pretty important that governments and public bodies use XSLT. https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih.xml https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih.... https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr400ih/xml/BILLS-119hr400ih.xml https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr400ih/xml/BIL... https://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KABE.xml https://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KABE.xml https://www.europarl.europa.eu/politicalparties/index_en.xml https://www.europarl.europa.eu/politicalparties/index_en.xml https://apps.tga.gov.au/downloads/sequence-description.xml https://apps.tga.gov.au/downloads/sequence-description.xml https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/downloads/fwi_obs/WeatherStations_CWFIS_export.xml https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/downloads/fwi_obs/WeatherStati... https://converters.eionet.europa.eu/xmlfile/EPRTR_MethodTypeCode_1.xml https://converters.eionet.europa.eu/xmlfile/EPRTR_MethodType... They don't put ads on their sites, so I'm not surprised Google doesn't give a fuck about them...

jiggawatts 11mo ago
> “They don't put ads on their sites, so I'm not surprised…” Similarly, Chrome regularly breaks or outright drops support for web features used only in private enterprise networks. Think NTLM or Kerberos authentication, private CA revocation list checking, that kind of thing. Again, nobody uses Google Ads on internal apps!
cedilla 11mo ago
Many governments and public bodies used Flash, ActiveX and Java applets, but I'm certainly glad we got rid of those.
- al_be_back 11mo ago
  Replaced them with App stores, why one code base when you can have N code bases: web sites, ios, android , tv … cheaper, privacy-oriented and more secure lol obviously not, doesn’t help the consumer or the developer. Xslt is brilliant at transforming raw data, a tree or table for example, without having to install Office apps or paying a number of providers to simply view it without massive disruption loops.

thesuitonym 11mo ago

I never realized styling RSS feeds was an options. Now looking at some of the examples, I wonder how many times I've clicked on "Feed", then rolled my eyes and closed it because I thought it wasn't RSS. More than zero, I'm sure.

behringer 11mo ago

It's the right direction if you're google. This is why Google should not be allowed to control the web. Support firefox, dump google.