Is IE7 the only one that can do this?

[Drew]

Is IE7 the only browser that can display RSS from within the browser without
dealing with CSS?.. I mean view the .XML directly.

 

[JDS]

Is IE7 the only browser that can display RSS from within the browser without
dealing with CSS?.. I mean view the .XML directly.

no

And what does CSS have to do with RSS? ("nothing" is the answer, unless
you had a typo)

 

[ironcorona]

Is IE7 the only browser that can display RSS from within the browser without
dealing with CSS?.. I mean view the .XML directly.

Are you talking about the XSLT that IE7 uses to view RSS? The fact that
it's an automatic process is IE7 only (for the moment) but it's nothing
special. It's just applying an XSL transform to the XML.

You might like to see the spec:
http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/
if you'd like to know how it works.

 

[Steve Pugh]

Is IE7 the only browser that can display RSS from within the browser without
dealing with CSS?.. I mean view the .XML directly.

No, many browsers can view the XML directly. Though if the document is
advertised as a feed via it's content-type then some browsers may try
to automatically display it as a feed and hence viewing it as raw XML
may take a few tricks on the part of the user.
Different browsers treat raw XML differently however. IE shows a tree
view of the XML structure, whilst Opera just shows the text nodes.

Steve

 

[Toby Inkster]

Is IE7 the only browser that can display RSS from within the browser without
dealing with CSS?.. I mean view the .XML directly.

No -- pretty much any XML-capable browser can, including Opera 7+, any
Mozilla-based browser.

 

[Toby Inkster]

And what does CSS have to do with RSS? ("nothing" is the answer, unless
you had a typo)

You can style an RSS file with CSS.

 

[Drew]

But, for example. I tried viewing the XML in IE6 and it showed the source
code.
So, we are talking about IE7/Netscape8 and the other browers you mentioned
(latest versions), right? I tried it with Firefox and didnt have much luck
with that. Maybe I was doing something wrong. Sorry if I sound ignorant, I
am getting my feet wet in this. This is actually my first day of getting
into all of this. I've got a feed set up at
http://drewclayton.com/index1.htm and it seems to be working pretty good. I
just would like to better understand who can and can't view it without using
an external viewer.

Thanks for putting up with my ignorance =)

 

[ironcorona]

But, for example. I tried viewing the XML in IE6 and it showed the source
code.

No it didn't. It showed the document tree. The source is all just
plain text

So, we are talking about IE7/Netscape8 and the other browers you mentioned
(latest versions), right?

IE7 styles it with XSL to be more human readable.

I
just would like to better understand who can and can't view it without using
an external viewer.

*Any* browser will show you the XML. Different browsers will do
different things to it in order to make it more useful to someone
reading it.

 

[Drew]

Ok, so I guess my question is then what browsers will format it in a way
that is easily read

 

[ironcorona]

Ok, so I guess my question is then what browsers will format it in a way
that is easily read

I do see what you mean and the answer is that IE7 will make it look most
like a webpage. But this isn't the whole concern. It's unlikely that
you'll want to be reading the XML by itself in this context. RSS is
really just for syndication and is only meant to be read by a feed
reader. Browsers aren't really set up to do much with RSS because if
you're going to be reading styled up RSS feeds on a browser you might as
well just go and read it off the main web site.

RSS feeds are designed to be read by feed readers so that you don't have
to waste a lot of time navigating to people's web sites. Some of them
do aggregation so that, for instance, if you had feeds from five
websites in your reader it would display the new posts as they are
published on the web instead of grouping them up into sections depending
on the website they come from.

 

[Drew]

RSS feeds are designed to be read by feed readers so that you don't have
to waste a lot of time navigating to people's web sites. Some of them do
aggregation so that, for instance, if you had feeds from five websites in
your reader it would display the new posts as they are published on the
web instead of grouping them up into sections depending on the website
they come from.

So, the user would have to copy/paste the .XML address into an external
viewer and store the collection in that? Is there a way to have the browser
automactally open the external viewer and add it to that?.. in order to make
it more seamless to the user

 

[JDS]

You can style an RSS file with CSS.

Your momma can style RSS with CSS.

Ha! Yeah! I told you. Booyaboobogoobbo!!

 

[Toby Inkster]

So, the user would have to copy/paste the .XML address into an external
viewer and store the collection in that?

Yep, if you like.

Is there a way to have the browser automactally open the external
viewer and add it to that?

Yep, if you like. But why bother? -- Opera and Firefox are both have
built-in RSS capabilities.

 

[ironcorona]

Yep, if you like.


Yep, if you like. But why bother? -- Opera and Firefox are both have
built-in RSS capabilities.

IMHO the FF reader capability is far inferior to the Opera one. I don't
find those live bookmarks very useful. The Opera reader, on the other
hand, is very very nice.

 

[Drew]

What do you think of the IE7 one?

 

[ironcorona]

What do you think of the IE7 one?

Oh that's pretty damn slick alright. Doesn't have all the functionality
of Opera but damn good... IMHO

 

[Andy Dingley]

You can style an RSS file with CSS.

Not (generally) in a useful manner though. RSS almost always needs a
<a> link to be generated, back to the original story. That's one of the
classic examples of "XML-styling" that's easy to do with XSLT but
impossible with CSS alone. You can style RSS to "a viewable web page"
with CSS alone, so long as you don't need a navigation menu and you
don't need links, but that's a very small subset of RSS usages.

 

[Toby Inkster]

Not (generally) in a useful manner though. RSS almost always needs a
<a> link to be generated, back to the original story.

Opera CSS linking extensions
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/#css

 

[Andy Dingley]

Opera CSS linking extensions
http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/#css

Eeuuwww 8-(

Didn't we realise this sort of vendor-specific extension was a bad idea
a few years ago?

 

[Toby Inkster]

Didn't we realise this sort of vendor-specific extension was a bad idea
a few years ago?

You mean like "-moz-appearance"? Or perhaps you mean like
"scrollbar-base-color"? Or maybe "-khtml-list-style"?