Show HN: RSS.Beauty – Make Your RSS Beautiful

ccbikai · 2024-12-31T13:09:57.000Z

RSS.Beauty is an RSS beautification tool based on XSLT technology that transforms ordinary RSS/Atom feeds into elegant reading interfaces.

giantrobot 1 year ago |

I've been using XSLT on RSS feeds forever now. It's a pretty awesome way to make it browser-accessible now that no browsers want to natively handle feeds. If you want to self-host an XSL for a feed it can be tricky serving the feed with the right Content-Type because some browsers want to throw feeds over to an external app even though they can display it themselves.

My favorite part is styling makes XML serve its original purpose on the web. It's just data serialization that can be interpreted by different user agents in different ways. A feed reader can do feed reader stuff but a web browser can still display a nicely styled human readable output.

XSLT is a really underused technology. It does not have a great developer experience but it's really powerful. It's also built into every web browser released in the past twenty years. Instead of megabytes of JavaScript to download, interpret, and run just to stylize some serialized data an XSL can do it all native in the browser.

PeterStuer 1 year ago | |

Totally breaks some RSS readers that render the page before processing.

giantrobot 1 year ago | | |

An RSS reader should not be paying any attention to a stylesheet. That is not part of the RSS or ATOM schema and is irrelevant to the "feed" portion of the document. If you come across a feed reader applying a stylesheet you should report it as a bug.

ccbikai 1 year ago | |

However, the compatibility differences among various browsers are significant, and the adaptation difficulty is also very high.

giantrobot 1 year ago | | |

WebKit and Gecko based browsers, so basically every device with a screen, supports XSLT 1.0 just fine. Even the old IE Trident engine had good support for XSLT. For styling an RSS feed XSLT 1.0 will do everything you need and that spec has been out for close to 26 years. I don't know what compatibility problems you're expecting.

Typically browser engines that don't support an XML specification version will do the proscribed thing and ignore it. So some old Series 60 WAP browser (were you to find such a thing today) would ignore the XSL stylesheet and display the raw XML or hand it to the registered handler for the content type.

The world went bonkers supporting XML on every computing platform under the Sun for nearly a decade.

WorldMaker 1 year ago |

The use of Tailwind feels rather bloated to me. Seems a big part of why it is 22KB for RSS.xsl. Not that you necessarily need to code golf an XSLT file to be as small as possible, but it just contributes to my disregard for Tailwind itself as a source of bloat as another example from the wild where Tailwind seems verbose and baroque.

ccbikai 1 year ago | |

Yes. Let me figure out a way to optimize Tailwind and remove unnecessary CSS.

Gys 1 year ago |

Using 'https://news.ycombinator.com/rss' I get 'Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (8053000e)'

ccbikai 1 year ago | |

Now the Firefox browser can display it properly

deivid 1 year ago |

Tried to use on mobile firefox, but seems to be doing something very CPU intensive, doesn't respond for ~10s then the tab crashes

onli 1 year ago | |

Even kills the app for me. Unresponsive afterwards, even after leaving the page.

ccbikai 1 year ago | | |

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused.

onli 1 year ago | | |

:) That's not necessary, but it would be interesting to know what trips Firefox up like that.

Mayank-Bansal 1 year ago | | |

Hi, I am part of the Mozilla community. Mozilla devs read through comments and saw an issue with Firefox. They filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1939643 to identify why it doesnt work only in Firefox. Turns out other browsers do not follow the spec, and the underlying libraries that the page uses used workarounds to make it work in Chrome, but that broke Firefox. We filed https://github.com/tsparticles/tsparticles/issues/5443 (to fix the workaround in the library), https://issues.chromium.org/issues/387030982 (Chrome bug to get it fixed there) and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1939701 (which creates a common webtest for all the browser vendors so that this functionality is tested in future and doesnt break).

All of this during the Holiday Season too!

deivid 1 year ago | | |

Amazing, thanks!

onli 1 year ago | | |

Indeed, very nice!

ccbikai 1 year ago | |

Thank you for your feedback, I will fix this issue as soon as possible.

thunderbong 1 year ago |

Nice!

Here's HN's rss

https://rss.beauty/rss?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.co...

ngetchell 1 year ago |

I haven't been able to open the app. Crashed firefox on mobile and is unresponsive in FF on my mac.

ccbikai 1 year ago | |

Firefox on Mac is now displaying correctly. Please take some time to help test Firefox on mobile devices

_-_-__-_-_- 1 year ago | |

Same here,

rishikeshs 1 year ago |

What’s the use of this?