One of the things hindering RSS/Atom is poor discoverability.

Normally, clicking on a link to an RSS/Atom feed brings up either a "wall of text" or even worse, a "Save As" dialog, both of which are useless and especially hostile to newcomers. This has lead to authors avoiding putting visible links to their feeds in their HTML pages. So now newcomers never even learn that feeds exist, never mind learn how useful they are!

I (with your help) can do something to get rid of the wall of text: make your feeds display as HTML when you click on them, even though the content is still valid XML!

So take a look at RSS.Style [1] and use the scripts to make your RSS/Atom feeds presentable. You can hotlink the scripts or use them as a starting point for your own feed styling. Code is pretty straightforward and easy to hack.

The other thing that I discovered while working on RSS.Style is that people are not paying enough attention to their feeds. RSS.Style requires that the basic fields are present (and correct) so it can use them in the template: It is shocking how many high-profile bloggers have errors in their feeds. I made a Feed Analyzer[2] that points out some common mistakes that are not covered by the W3C's feed validator. I name and shame some of the top HN contributors[3] on the RSS.Style home page. Even HN's feeds have issues [4] ! (<- @dang take note!)

I originally wrote RSS.Style using XSLT, but Google, as the malevolent friend of the open web, is deprecating XSLT. So I switched to JavaScript, which works everywhere as long as you use a supported Content-Type.

Source is available[5] and everything is MIT licensed. The preview and analyzer are written in TypeScript (no judging! it is just a side project!) and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

[1] https://www.rss.style/

[2] https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html

[3] https://www.rss.style/#examples

[4] https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html?feedurl=https%3A%2F...

[5] https://github.com/fileformat/rss.style

Show HN: RSS.Style – better UX for RSS/Atom links, now using JS instead of XSLT