As the #joiito regulars rehashed their thoughts on CSS in syndicated feeds, Joi Ito himself announced that he's styling his RSS feed (with help from Richard Soderberg). Many have noted that this doesn't work in some aggregators. Some are filing bug reports with their aggregator of choice. NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons notes:
Some people think it's cool, others don't. I suspect an obvious feature request will be for aggregators to notice when this technique is being used and be able to turn it on and off.
That's a start. The consensus, it seems: strip inline styles (specified within the HTML/XHTML style element) and external styles (in external style sheet files), but allow styles specified within the style attribute. The truth: we don't want your styles.
Wes Carr's comments effectively synopsize our thoughts:
I think this is a mistake for several reasons. First, I see you use linking to import your css, which is required to be declared within the HEAD tag in html. The DESCRIPTION tag in RSS is equivalent to the body tag, so this is invalid markup.
Also, by using CSS you start catering to specific aggregators and go away from what RSS is all about: SIMPLE syndication. News aggragtors should allow users to customize layouts, like Feed Demon for example, instead of relying on the feeds.
Personally, I find it quite annoying to have my style preferences overriden by others.
Simple syndication. This is why we've been reluctant to apply any styles to our feeds. There are several (already discussed) reasons to style feeds for browsers, but no (good) reasons to send styles to aggregators. We may even want to use display: none; (like we're doing in our Atom feed) to hide sections of the feed from browser visitors. It'd be a disaster if aggregators applied this rule. And it'd at least be a visual disaster if they applied any other.
Oh yeah, happy holidays, and all that.
Update:
Anil Dash advocated styling feeds nearly a year ago. Tom Coates replied:
No! No! This can't be allowed to happen! We've tried over and over again to make a version of our sites that are completely open and visible to everyone - standards compliant and accessible. We finally have a different way of doing things that mean that you can read sites in a text-only format and we want to get RID of it!? This is insane! HTML e-mail was a stupid move that fulfilled no function. Newsreaders and RSS should be kept clean and pure and simple. Keep the web for displaying things in a published style. Let Newsreaders be plain text, please!