RSS Style

What is this?

Every website that updates routinely should have an RSS or Atomnews feed that people (and search engines) can use to watch for changes.

By default, these files look horrible when a human looks at them in a browser. But there is a simple way to make them look better:RSS Style!

If you are not a webmaster, checkout outWhat is a new feed? andPicking a news reader for how to get started!

How do I use it?

You need to know the name of your RSS/Atom file. It is usually something likefeed.xml,atom.xml orrss.xml. You may be able to use theFeed Analyzer to help you find it. These examples usefeed.xml, but you should replace it with the name of your feed file.

Download one of theavailable styles and save it asfeed.xslt in the same directory as yourfeed.xml file. Note that the extension is.xslt and NOT.xml!

Add it to yourfeed.xmlfile. At the top of the file, it will look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss ...>...

Add a line in the middle so it looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="feed.xslt"?><rss ...>...

Troubleshooting

Available styles

• simple-rss.xslt - for RSS feeds
• simple-atom.xslt - for Atom feeds

Questions and Answers

Which file do I add it to?

Your feed file is often namedfeed.xml but can be anything. You can use theFeed Analyzer to find the URL of your feed: put it your website's URL and it will display the feeds that it finds.

How does this work?

Thexml-stylesheet processing instruction tells the browser to use the XSLT stylesheet to transform the raw XML into HTML. This has been supported by all major browsers for a long time.

Why does the analyzer complain about the content-type?

While there are official content-types for RSS and Atom feeds, some browsers will try to download the feeds rather than display them. This is suboptimal (to say the least), so I strongly recommend using the plain XML content typetext/xml. You can test how your browser behaves with theContent-Type Testing page.

Links

• Help! What is a feed? (About Feeds)
• Web feed on Wikipedia
• RFC 4287: The Atom Syndication Format
• RSS Advisory Board: RSS 2.0 specification
• All about RSS - A directory of RSS resources
• RSS Advisory Board: RSS 2.0 Best Practices
• RSS Feed Best Practises (Kevin Cox) - Everything except theContent Type: onlytext/xml works across browsers.
• XML.Style: XSLT links and resources
• How to style RSS feed (Lepture aka Hsiaoming Yang)
• Styling an RSS Feed With XSLT (Nat Clark)
• Adding a CSS StyleSheet to your RSS Feed (Pete Freitag)

Examples

Share: