Retiring My Web JSON Feed to Style the Web Atom Feed In-Browser

I retired my web JSON feed to be able to style the web Atom XML feed with XSLT to educate feed beginner. People, who don’t know what an Atom or RSS feed is, and who might click on the feed links and don’t know what happens.

It’s no news that people are ignorant about subscribe-able web feeds. And that the experience is not great, either. If users don’t have a feed reader app on their devices installed already, a click on a feed link will either download the file in the background or display the raw feed. Both will confuse users. Only Safari on macOS helps users out and displays:

>This is a link to an RSS feed. Would you like to search the App Store for apps that can display RSS feeds?

To mitigate this dilemma, and as long as we use XML feeds, we can use XSLT to style the XML feed. My Atom feed is styled by an XSLT file. It works great in Chrome and Safari, even with dark mode, but Firefox always uses the dark mode colors. I’m not happy, but I’m okay with it.

My web Atom XML feed

The XSLT file to style the XML

To have the browser apply the XSLT, the returned media type for the feed has to be `application/xml`. The more correct `application/atom+xml` doesn’t work and will show above behavior.

Because I believe it’s more important to help users out than to have the same feed in a slightly better format, I had to remove my JSON feed. Subscribers to the JSON feed, please update your feed readers to above Atom feed. I will delete the feed in a couple of weeks.

In the end I didn’t gain much by using the JSON feed. For my current number of posts (~100), the full-text JSON feed is 475 KiB, while the Atom feed is 499 KiB. That’s only five percent less. I also noticed from my logs, that the Atom feed requests result in more `HTTP 304 Not Modified`, while the JSON feed is always downloaded again. And to be realistic, the JSON feed format won’t replace the old formats anytime soon. And as long as reader apps won’t drop support for them, we can just continuing using an Atom feed and ignore the noisy XML.

Update 2023-12-31

There’s also a way to style the XML feed with CSS.

Styling XML with CSS

Update 2024-01-02

I styled my `sitemap.xml` as well.