RSS.Style: better user experience for RSS and Atom links

One of the things that (IMHO) is hindering RSS/Atom is poor discoverability.

The major browsers no longer support it, so clicking on a RSS/Atom link brings up either a “wall of text” or even worse, a “Save As” dialog, both of which are useless and especially hostile to newcomers. This has lead to authors avoiding putting visible links to their feeds in the HTML body. So now newcomers never even know that feeds are a thing.

There’s not much I can do to help with built-in browser support, but I can do something to make feeds look better when you click on them: add some style! Introducing RSS.Style to help you add a stylesheet to your RSS/Atom feed, including a (rather generic-looking) sample style template and a way to preview it.

The other thing that I discovered while working on RSS.Style is that people are not paying enough attention to their feeds. RSS.Style requires that the basic fields are present (and correct) so it can use them in the template: It is shocking how many high-profile bloggers have errors in their feeds. I made a Feed Analyzer that points out some common mistakes that are not covered by the W3C’s feed validator.

You can see it in action on my blog’s RSS feed!

Source is available at github.com/fileformat/rss.style and is MIT licensed. The preview and analyzer are written in TypeScript and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.