IE6 and FF render Atom/RSS feeds as html using the
xml-stylesheet directive, however, IE7 Beta 2 drops the feed's xml-stylesheet
directive, if one exists, and replacing with IE7's own stylesheet
containing the gray to blue gradient background with the MS RSS extensions for
navigation/collation. This rendering is all pre subscribe, so the feed has
not been converted to RSS yet. I had an email
conversation last week with Sean
Lyndersay about this, and his take is that "this is a feed intended for
rendering in an aggregator" and "Publishers’ don’t have control over the look of
their feed in" other readers.
My counterpoint is that this is non-standard approach
because the xml-stylesheet directive is a standard XML directive, and IE7 (the
reader, not the browser) is essentially saying that RSS/Atom are not first
of all XML and should be handled in some proprietary way through IE's
display/navigation layer. Feeds that use the
xml-stylesheet to provide custom navigation are now in IE7 required to use
the IE7 navigation xsl, which is not standard. The solution, I believe, is
that the IE7 proprietary rendering (and xml-stylesheet removal) be the default
ONLY when none is provided, which is probably most
cases.
I would call IE7 dropping xml-stylesheet directives a data lose
issue. So my question is, what is the
right thing for the browser to do? When is a browser a feed reader, and
thus (I guess) simply can drop elements from the feed at will? Can a
browser just drop xml-stylesheet directives at
will?
Thanks,
James
