On the frontend, not really. I built a small blog with XML and XSLT a few years ago and I was able to get things to mostly work, but XML and XSLT support in browsers is bad. It's been stuck at 1.0 with missing features for years and Chromium and FireFox both keep threatening to remove it. One day they will follow through with it.
I've done the "transform XML with XSLT in the browser" a few times before and it worked pretty well. Writing the XSLT was a pain in the ass because the tooling to do so sucked but once it was written it just worked.
It even worked inside JavaScript since that could just grab that XML, ignore the stylesheet, then proceed because it was just an XHR. The modern JSON based equivalent is just an under specified mess.
XML is actually pretty cool and useful. I find JSON to be a poor replacement.
I would always recommend using an XSL transformation first, in order to avoid these limitations.
See also: https://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2009/06/how-to-use-xslt-to...
I tried everything I could think of to style my RSS feed but nothing worked until I added a bunch of garbage at the top of the file to keep the browser from ignoring my instructions, and this was all the way back in 2020.
The two browsers you were complaining about are IE, long dead, and Firefox, which removed its feed reading functionality in 2018. I can only assume that you’re misremembering when you last tried this, because what you’re describing simply doesn’t happen any more.
You assume incorrectly. The earliest date in my rss file is August 2019, which is the test entry I made to make sure it worked.
Firefox dropped Live Bookmark support in December 2018, version 64.0. I was using Debian stable and Firefox ESR at the time, which was Firefox 60.9.
So I did get bitten by this, but I decided to try styling rss feeds at the exact wrong time.
Here’s a sample, having taken this feed.xml, switched it to <content type="xhtml">, and added my own stylesheet: https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2024-05-04-hn-40246841.xml
There’s all kinds of fun stuff you can then add, such as pagination as you get more entries, rather than just deleting old ones. I’d suggest adding actual links using the fragment and xml:id attribute (mapped to HTML id in the stylesheet), but that wouldn’t play nicely with pagination shifting entries.
You can even do things like publish an Atom entry document for each entry, so they have their own paths, but that that URL is still an Atom document. Basically, if you want to, you can completely realistically have a full blog where everything is in Atom containers instead of HTML containers.