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RSS.Style

better UX for RSS/Atom links, now using JS instead of XSLT

Details

External ID
46587349
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
RSS.Style
Website domain
rss.style
Launched
Jan. 12, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
6
Upvotes percentile
0.2549407114624506
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

One of the things hindering RSS/Atom is poor discoverability.Normally, clicking on a link to an RSS/Atom feed brings up either a "wall of text" or even worse, a "Save As" dialog, both of which are useless and especially hostile to newcomers. This has lead to authors avoiding putting visible links to their feeds in their HTML pages. So now newcomers never even learn that feeds exist, never mind learn how useful they are!I (with your help) can do something to get rid of the wall of text: make your feeds display as HTML when you click on them, even though the content is still valid XML!So take a look at RSS.Style [1] and use the scripts to make your RSS/Atom feeds presentable. You can hotlink the scripts or use them as a starting point for your own feed styling. Code is pretty straightforward and easy to hack.The other thing that I discovered while working on RSS.Style is that people are not paying enough attention to their feeds. RSS.Style requires that the basic fields are present (and correct) so it can use them in the template: It is shocking how many high-profile bloggers have errors in their feeds. I made a Feed Analyzer[2] that points out some common mistakes that are not covered by the W3C's feed validator. I name and shame some of the top HN contributors[3] on the RSS.Style home page. Even HN's feeds have issues [4] ! (<- @dang take note!)I originally wrote RSS.Style using XSLT, but Google, as the malevolent friend of the open web, is deprecating XSLT. So I switched to JavaScript, which works everywhere as long as you use a supported Content-Type.Source is available[5] and everything is MIT licensed. The preview and analyzer are written in TypeScript (no judging! it is just a side project!) and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.[1] https://www.rss.style/[2] https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html[3] https://www.rss.style/#examples[4] https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html?feedurl=https%3A%2F...[5] https://github.com/fileformat/rss.style

Enrichment

Theme
email design, templates, and productivity
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
better rss feed reader interface
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes It is a client-side JavaScript file embedded into XML feeds that parses the RSS/Atom DOM and replaces it with styled HTML for browser viewing.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 86 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #69 of 87 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 69 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

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