Perhaps there is a reasonable way to style feeds so that text with images doesn’t look terrible in feed readers. And by reasonable I don’t include writing a boatload of XSL to transform an Atom feed. I checked out this site’s feed in Bloglines and was disappointed to see an ugly, blue 1px border around my images. (Oh, remember the times we had together Bloglines? You taught me about feed reading, and then I left you for Google Reader v2. We’ll always have Scripting News.) Of course, putting all CSS styling inline is a non-starter. There should be a simple way to float some images around text, and pretty up how many people interact with websites in these modern times. That’s not too much to ask, right?
The best I’ve found so far is a Wordpress plugin called Feed Styler that takes some CSS rules (put into WP, not a css file) and inserts them inline into the WP feed. Does the trick, even if it isn’t a general solution.
February 27th, 2008 at 8:21 am
I don’t understand “inline CSS is a non-starter”. When you get added to the planet-jazz aggregator, your feed entries will be stand-alone mixed into a bunch of other rando Joe’s feed entries. If the CSS isn’t inline, I can’t imagine where else it would be.
Sounds like your plugin is doing this for you. Perfect. I prefer to do them by hand, so I don’t have to guess, or rely on someone else’s horrible design facilities (as opposed to my own horrible design capabilities) to make a post ‘look nice’.
In terms of “worse case scenario”, consider that some of aggregators, and even ‘blog publishers’, will happily strip the inline CSS out of your entry before (re-)posting. Or, more challengingly, just strip SOME of it.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Good points. My frustration was chosing between 1) using an external stylesheet which didn’t apply to how my feed would appear 2) writing the CSS inline for each entry, making it harder to edit if I change the design later. The plugin acts like a macro, and saves me from having to hand-edit each entry.
I’ve noticed different aggregators doing interesting things with which styles are preserved.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Thanks for the mention of the plugin Mike. It appears you’ve got the function of the plugin down pretty good.
The reason between the styles is that some feed readers will strip out inline styles (such as Feed Demon).
For example, if you use Feed Styler for images, you’ll notice I use deprecated attributes such as ‘align’ and ‘border’ while also using inline styles. It may seem redundant, but the ones that strip out inline styles usually pick up the deprecated image attributes.