CSS Styles in RSS Content

Always rehashing, always rehashing. Brent talks about CSS styling of RSS entries within NetNewsWire, due to one user's lament about the loss of visual innuendo:

But I like looking at blogs in the web browser, especially when they have a really appealing visual design. It's part of the whole package. When you separate the words from the design, all blogs start to muddy together. Without a face to associate with the words, the author's web design more-or-less becomes their identity. My brain says, "these words came from here" and in a real-life conversation, that "here" would be a face, but on the web, it's someone's stylesheet. It seems odd to strip that out by pulling it through an RSS aggregator.

My response:

Inevitably, what a lot of blog authors fail to remember is that RSS is about syndicating CONTENT, not about syndicating DESIGN. When my local newspaper reprints an Associate Press article, I don't see AP logos or AP's styling: it's in the style of the local newspaper. When Yahoo! runs a Reuters story on their site, they don't reproduce Reuters.com's style on their pages - they merely use the Reuters logo, which is already doable within RSS. Allowing authors to style their content is not improving RSS, it's degrading the very reason for it's existence: to syndicate content, not style.