How can I apply my CSS stylesheet to an RSS feed
On my blog I use some CSS classes which are defined in my stylesheet, but in RSS readers those styles don't show up. I had been searching for class="whatever" and replacing with style="something: something;". But this means whenever I modify my CSS I need to modify my RSS-generating code too, and it doesn't work for a tag which belongs to multiple classes (i.e. class="snapshot accent"). Is there any way to point to my stylesheet from my feed?
Answer
The popular RSS readers WILL NOT bother downloading a style sheet, even if you provide one and link to it using <?xml-stylesheet?>.
Many RSS readers simply strip all inline style attributes from your tags. From testing today, I discovered that Outlook 2007 seems to strip out all styles, for example, even if they are inline.
Good RSS readers allow a limited set of inline style attributes. See, for example, this article at Bloglines about what CSS they won't strip. From experimentation, Google Reader seems to pass through certain styles unharmed.
The philosophy of RSS is indeed that the reader is responsible for presentation. Many people think that RSS should be plain text and that CSS in RSS feeds is inappropriate. It's probably not appropriate to impose a different font on your RSS feeds. However, certain types of content (for example, images floated on the left, with captions positioned carefully) require a minimal amount of styling in order to maintain their semantic meaning.