Neat RSS + XSL Trick
Posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2003 7:16 PM
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:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/rss/rss2html.xsl"?>
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!
-Russ