circle.ch :: CSS styling on RSS feeds

circle.ch weblog by Urs Gehrig

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2010-08-25T08:13:16

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15. August 2003

CSS styling on RSS feeds
Technology (wiki) - urs @ 00:54:16

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgericht) has moved to a more open policy concerning the publication of its decisions taken. That's about more than two years ago. There is a daily update on new decisions to be published on the Courts website [1]. Unfortunately, they do not provide any XML output or RSS feeds. That is the point, where I have been asked by some people to have a look at possibilities to come up with a solution. I can provide a cached RSS feed [2], which is legible XML by humans and of course valid RSS 0.9 for aggregators.

I came across a developer paper at Apple [3], where they give an example on how CSS styling on RSS [2] could be done. Nevertheless, it needed some more tuning to fit to my needs. As far as I could test it, it only works for RSS, not for RDF or even pie/echo/atom [4].

Having jumped that hurdle, I was looking around for yet another RSS feed aggregator and found an alpha version of a quite amazing solution being realized as OpenSource project. The reader is called FeedReader [5] and runs on Windows 95/98/2000 and most probably on XP.

Unfortunately Java JRE 1.4 made some troubles on my system, so I am stuck to 1.3 and that is finally the reason, why I could no have a go on Newsmonster, which is said to be an RSS news reader plug-in for Mozilla [6]; there is a Free and a Pro version.

[1] http://www.bger.ch
[2] http://circle.ch/media/?type=rss&channel=bger
[3] http://developer.apple.com/internet/css/xmltransformations.html
[4] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/05/atom02
[5] http://feedreader.sourceforge.net
[6] http://www.newsmonster.org