This is a quick thought. I’ll need to clean this post up a bit when I have more time.
After my tinkerage [and breaking] of my feeds by applying XSL Stylesheets to them, I’ve come to the complusion
that we need a new @media type for “feedreader”, or “automated”, or something else other than “screen”.
The whole reason I wanted to use a client-side XSL stylesheet was to transform the highly-namespaced feeds into pure HTML, then apply a
CSS stylesheet to the result; a sort of “pretty” version of an RSS feed when viewing it in a browser. This is even more important to use XSL to transform it into HTML considering how non-working IE is in terms of applying CSS stylesheets to namespaced XML.
What led me astray was the misconception that the XSL stylsheet would NOT be applied by feed readers. A silly misconception, but a valid one.
If I view the whole feed XML document in a browssr (or rendering engine), I would expect it to apply the xsl stylehseet. Fine.
But, if I only intend to download and parse the XML feed document, why apply the screen stylesheet?
Why does feedvalidators.com apply a screen XSL stylesheet and fail to read and validate my feed when all it is supposed to do is parse and validate the contents of the primary XML feed file?
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s Doing The Right thing. I just think that we need a way to specify that n automated reader should not parse external stylesheets.
Let’s take this example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="rss.xsl" type="text/xsl" media="screen"?>
<rss>
...
</rss>
Feedvalidator.com, and presumeably all feed readera, break because they apply the XSL stylesheet and then try to render/parse XHTML, which is not a valid feed format.
Does feedvalidator.com really belong to any of these possible CSS @media types?
- all
- Used for all media type devices
- aural
- Used for speech and sound synthesizers
- braille
- Used for braille tactile feedback devices
- embossed
- Used for paged braille printers
- handheld
- Used for small or handheld devices
- Used for printers
- projection
- Used for projected presentations, like slides
- screen
- Used for computer screens
- tty
- Used for media using a fixed-pitch character grid, like teletypes and terminals
- tv
- Used for television-type devices
Not really. Or more importantly, we need a new type that is purposely geared for non-screen displaying, remote, automated parsers.
In addition to that, things like feedvalidator.com and and feed readers who simple load the XML doc and parse it (as apposed to displaying it as a whole document) should ignore
the media type of “screen”.