Many governments and public bodies used Flash, ActiveX and Java applets, but I'm certainly glad we got rid of those.

> “They don't put ads on their sites, so I'm not surprised…”

Similarly, Chrome regularly breaks or outright drops support for web features used only in private enterprise networks. Think NTLM or Kerberos authentication, private CA revocation list checking, that kind of thing.

Again, nobody uses Google Ads on internal apps!

Gotta love the reference to the <link> header element. There used to be an icon in the browser URL bar when a site had a feed, but they nuked that too.

iIRC, all of the proposed workarounds involved updating the sites using XSLT, which may not always be particularly easy, or even something publishers will realize they need to do.

Here's a 3rd option :)

For RSS/Atom feeds presented as links in a site (for convenience to users), developers can always offer a simple preview for the feed output using: https://feedreader.xyz/

Just URL-encode the feed like so: https://feedreader.xyz/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2...

...and you get a nice preview that's human readable.

You are probably right, but it is depressing how techies don't see the big picture & don't want to provide an on-ramp to the RSS/Atom world for newcomers.

You've been in the RSS world since the beginning and never seen a stylized feed?

I've not been in the RSS world very much. I don't use news readers. And even I have seen a stylized RSS in the wild.

Our individual experiences are of course anecdotal, I'm just surprised at how different they are given your background.

> nor have I seen one.

Once upon a time, nice in-browser rendering of RSS/Atom feeds complete with search and sorting was a headliner feature of Safari.

https://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_subscribe_to_rss_feed...

I think it used to be more popular in early days. At one point i think firefox was styling rss feeds by default so people stopped using xslt as much.

You can still style them with css if you want. I dont really see the point. RSS is for machines to read not humans.

there's a fairly good chance that you simply haven't noticed, because it was working as intended, e.g. https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824952

Another point: it is shocking how many feeds have errors in them. I analyzed the feeds of some of the top contributors on HN, and almost all had something wrong with them.

Even RSS wizards would benefit from looking at a human-readable version instead of raw XML.

I ended up writing a feed analyzer that you can try on your feed: https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html

That's my point: you know all about RSS & feeds and don't need it. But what about someone who hasn't been using them since the beginning?

I think every page with an RSS feed should have a link to the feed in the html body. And it should be friendly to people who are not RSS wizards.

> I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one.

Maybe it's more for people who have no idea what RSS is and click on the intriguing icon. If they weren't greeted with a load of what seems like nonsense for nerds there could have been broader adoption of RSS.

The phrase you are looking for to describe this discourse is “concern trolling.”

> I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one.

So that excludes you from the "someone who hasn't seen/used a RSS reader" demographic mentioned in the comment you are replying to.

> XSLT isn't going anywhere: hardwiring into the browser an implementation that's known to be insecure and is basically unmaintained is what's going away.

Not having it available from the browser really reduces the ability to use it in many cases, and lots of the nonbrowser XSLT ecosystem relies on the same insecure, unmaintained implementation. There is at least one major alternative (Saxon), and if browser support was switching backing implementation rather than just ending support, “XSLT isn’t going anywhere” would be a more natural conclusion, but that’s not, for whatever reason, the case.

Or perhaps the multi-billion-dollar corporations could stop piggy-backing on volunteers and invest in maintaining the Web platform?

So... you want newbies to install an extension/plugin before they get a human-readable view of a feed???

That's about as new-user-hostile as I can imagine.

> XSLT isn't going anywhere

XSLT as a feature is being removed from web browsers, which is pretty significant. Sure it can still be used in standalone tools and libraries, but having it in web browsers enabled a lot of functionality people have been relying on since the dawn of the web.

> hardwiring into the browser an implementation that's known to be insecure and is basically unmaintained is what's going away

So why not switch to a better maintained and more secure implementation? Firefox uses TransforMiix, which I haven't seen mentioned in any of Google's posts on the topic. I can't comment on whether it's an improvement, but it's certainly an option.

> The people doing the wailing/rending/gnashing about the removal of libxslt needed to step up to fix and maintain it.

Really? How about a trillion dollar corporation steps up to sponsor the lone maintainer who has been doing a thankless job for decades? Or directly takes over maintenance?

They certainly have enough resources to maintain a core web library and fix all the security issues if they wanted to. The fact they're deciding to remove the feature instead is a sign that they simply don't.

And I don't buy the excuse that XSLT is a niche feature. Their HTML bastardization AMP probably has even less users, and they're happily maintaining that abomination.

> It seems like something an extension ought to be capable of

I seriously doubt an extension implemented with the restricted MV3 API could do everything XSLT was used for.

> and if not, fix the extension API so it can.

Who? Try proposing a new extension API to a platform controlled by mega-corporations, and see how that goes.