This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Russell Beattie.
Original Post: Neat RSS + XSL Trick
Feed Title: Russell Beattie Notebook
Feed URL: http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/rss.jsp?q=java,code,mobile
Feed Description: My online notebook with thoughts, comments, links and more.
I'm such a dork sometimes. You'd figure with all the time I'm spending on XML lately, I would have thought of this myself, but I hadn't. What I'm talking about is putting an XSL Stylesheet header in your RSS documents so that when a browser like Moz or IE6 sees it, it'll render the XML instead of dumping raw tags in case you click on it.
I got this from Rafe's All About Symbian New Series 60 App Feed which shows the latest S60 applications that appear on Handango. When I clicked on it from a chat window, it rendered as readable in my browser and I was like "Huh? How'd that happen?" And was thinking embedded HTML (duh) and it took seriously, less than a second for me to think "No HTML, must be a stylesheet..." and poof there it was right at the top. I don't know why I hadn't thought about doing that to RSS feeds before! Neato!
It's as simple as hell to do, just add a XSL declaration after your initial XML header like:
If you're using a decent browser, it'll pick up the XSL and format it accordingly. This is *very* cool. Having links on pages to RSS for those who have no idea what RSS is, is a real user-unfriendly thing to do. The monkies don't like when they click on links and receive a boatload of XML in their face.
Rafe claims he copied it from somewhere else, and I'll be copying it from him, so no biggie. Nice find Rafe!
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