Bloglines latest innovation will blur the line between reading a news item in its “native” form and reading it via RSS even further. In an announcement Tuesday (18 September), Bloglines released limited support for Cascading Style Sheets within blog posts that it displays.
In other words, if I’m doing this right, if you are reading this at Bloglines (or at RSS4Lib.com), this paragraph will have a bright blue background. That’s because I added the inline style “style=’background-color: #00A0E1′” to the <span> tag that starts this paragraph.
Bloglines has restricted the range of CSS values it allows — to prevent clever (or malicious) RSS creators from wreaking havoc with the interface. A (lengthy) list of allowed styles is on the Bloglines site.
While offering its users a richer reading experience, Bloglines is also making the distinction between the blog page and the RSS feed even smaller.
4 thoughts on “Bloglines Supports Cascading Style Sheets”
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It’s worth noting that the blue came through bright and clear within Google Reader — not a huge surprise, I guess, given that it’s also browser-based.
And annoying that it didn’t show up at all in Bloglines.
It came through bright blue in my feed reader.
However, I don’t like the change. Especially when inline-styles are being encouraged.
It makes RSS harder to parse and render across multiple devices and systems.
Paul,
Your point is well taken — and one I hadn’t thought of initially.
“Screen-scraping” an RSS feed has up until now been much simpler than doing the same for the source web page. As RSS evolves, will this change? Or will RSS/Atom evolve into subchannels — brief, full, verbose — so that a reader can pick what they want?
Perhaps there’s a use for RSS 0.92, in all its underpowered simplicity, after all!