[Feeds] Re: Article on 'What RSS Needs'

[Micah R Ledbetter <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

I came here from the article. (Via RSS!)

I'm a humble feed publisher, and the first thing that came to mind when I read this was presentation. Readers strip most CSS (though sometimes will allow specific inline styles on specific elements), and render things differently from a whole browser. There's no way to know how a particular element will be displayed without CSS without trying it in a given reader. Some specific examples:

* SVGs are sometimes displayed too large.
* SVGs intended to be displayed inline, like sprites or in-place emoji
  replacements, are sometimes displayed as block, rather than inline-block.
* NetNewsWire for Mac currently will render a border on an
  <aside style="border:...">, but NNW for iOS will not.
* As of 2021, Feedbin would not display inline <svg> elements, but Reeder and
  NetNewsWire for iOS would. (This may have changed since then.)

It's one thing to have a limitation, like no styling, but it's in some ways worse to have an inconsistent limitation where styling works only sometimes. A site owner might not know what's supposed to work everywhere and what isn't, and can't trust a spot-check with whatever feed reader they happen to use.