What would we do without web server logs and the statistics gathered from them using such scripts as AWStats? It seems quite a number of people are hitting my RSS feed with just a plain old web browser and will only see a rather confusing looking raw XML document tree which isn’t much good at all.
What’s needed is a touch of style to be applied to the XML. The W3C has not one, but two stylesheet languages, CSS and XSL. From the title of this post, you already know I’ll being using XSL… but why? The reason is quite simple, because with XSL it’s possible to go from RSS document data and semantics, have it transformed as per the stylistic rules in the XSL stylesheet which will in turn generate an XHTML document which can be displayed with a browser, perhaps with presentational styles applied using CSS.
XSL also has much more flexibility in creating generated content which wasn’t in the source document. Though it’s possible to generate content since CSS2, it’s only meant for small bits of text such as page chapter & subsection headers.
Anyhow, here’s the XSL transformed RSS feed and the XSL document that did it all. RSS readers, with their inability to apply or not applying the transformation means they’ll still get the raw XML as originally intended.