Statement: Every RSS feed in the world should have an XSLT stylesheet.
I was listening to a discussion from Gnomedex that iPodder grabbed for me. This guy from Yahoo was talking about their new RSS tools. One of the things he mentioned is the new 
button. He made a good point. A lot of people see that little, orange “RSS” button and give it a click. They’re then faced with a naked XML document. That can be very confusing for the average user.
While the Yahoo link is a good option, it really is limited to only Yahoo’s users. XML documents have the option of linking in other docuemnts for formatting their data. One format that’s particularly insteresting is XSLT, which is a formatting markup language for XML. Most modern browsers can parse this data, and will do so automatically.
What this means for the user is this: Instead of seeing some confusing looking XML document, users who navigate to an RSS feed with their browsers can actually see a very usable web page. At the bare minimum, it should be a doc that explains to them what an RSS document is and how to use it. Even better, it could be a formatted version of the content of the XML document. Idealy, it would do both. Using XSLT, an RSS doc can become just like any other page a user might view. They can even bookmark it and just go there instead of downloading some RSS aggregator.
The really cool part is that all this is done without messing with the actual XML doc. Thus, all RSS aggregators can grab the exact same document and do their magic with it.
I really can’t think of any reason why someone would not want this on their site. If you can think of any, I would love to hear them.
I agree with you, rss and xslt is a really cool combination. I use it here for my wallpapers : http://stombi.free.fr/wallpapers/
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stombi
Wow. I’m really impressed with what you did there. I would like to see the podcasting community come up with something similar to their feeds. Just having the enclosures linked through the XSLT would make the pages way more accessable.
I’ve read something similar to this discussion before . All good ideas, but care needs to be made to differentiate stylistically between the styled feed and the site itself. If your feed looks exactly like your site, it will be more confusing than anything. Without a visual cue that something has changed, a n00b will just keep on clicking.
I both agree and disagree with that statement.
Yes, I think there should be a distinguising comment on there that lets the user know they are looking at an RSS feed. But, I think it should be there to let the user know they have other options. I don’t think it should be there to discourage the user from coming back the the feed on their browser. RSS should all about helping the user get to your content the way they want. I think it would be just fine if the user wanted to bookmark my feed and view my site that way.
I do this on my own site. Here’s my main RSS feed.
Dave Shea was the first to popularize this idea, as far as I know: “Plugging the RSS Usability Hole.”Sean Burke also has some great stuff in this area: “Making RSS Pretty”