Show HN: RSS.Beauty – Make Your RSS Beautiful (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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

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

Nice!

Here's HN's rss

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

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

What’s the use of this?