Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

use Perl

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

use Perl Log In

[ Create a new account ]

ziggy (25)

ziggy
(email not shown publicly)
AOL IM: ziggyatpanix (Add Buddy, Send Message)

Journal of ziggy (25)

Thursday December 16, 2004

08:57 AM

Best Practices in Syndication

[ #22330 ]

delegatrix pointed me to these RSS Feeds over at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/rss/. Load one of them in your browser, and it looks like HTML. But it's really RSS.

How'd they do that? Here's the secret:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="rss_stylesheet.xsl"?>

Yep. All of the HTML fluff is statically defined in a stylesheet, comon to half a dozen news feeds. Aggregators are happy, and reasonable browsers do something useful. Feeds change, and there's no work to be done. Change the shell once, and it's used for all six feeds.

And that's the way it should be. ;-)

</soapbox>

List all Journal entries

Best Practices in Syndication More | Login | Reply

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

Another needed practice (Score:2)

by jdavidb (1361)

But when they generate the HTML, they need to add the tag that tells Firefox to add the little RSS button at the bottom corner, so I can subscribe to the feed as a live bookmark.

--
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
not in safari (Score:2)

by merlyn (47)
must work in some "other" browser. Safari just sits there displaying a little ugly text.
--
- Randal L. Schwartz
- Stonehenge
- Re:not in safari (Score:2)
  
  by delegatrix (506)
  
  Yeah, Safari just displays the text of the feed as contained in the xml. It should still work correctly as a feed.
- Re:not in safari (Score:1)
  
  by Aristotle (5147)
  
  Safari doesn't have an XSLT engine built in. All other contemporary browsers do, as does Internet Explorer. But I know they're working on sticking libxslt into some future release of Safari.
CSS Styled RSS Feeds (Score:1)

by DarkBlue (2392)

While not common, CSS-styled RSS feeds are out there. FeedBurner [feedburner.com] has been offering this service for quite a while. I use the service for my own RSS [feedburner.com].
Uh… (Score:1)

by Aristotle (5147)

You been to our own TorgoX [perl.org]'s Interglacial [interglacial.com] yet? Try any click any of his feeds… :-)