Im making a normal RSS feed for my website. I need to include simple html formatting in the description eg paragraphs, line breaks, lists, etc. To do this I need to wrap the description content as CDATA.
The issue with this is that when I validate my feed the content of the CDATA is ignored. So although the feed validates, I dont actually know if everything is ok or not.
How can I find out what markup will likely be read ok by the various RSS readers?
Can I use whatever markup I would happily put in a website? How about inline styles? Or is more like designing html emails? Thanks
RSS files are XML Formatted plain text, I think that's the only standard you can rely upon.
I think most Syndicators look like they're handling HTML in RSS as they simply download the linked article when you choose the header.
If you're looking to embed rich content, then you may well be better investigating Atom instead of RSS.
Have a look at this S/O question: Which is better for encoding HTML for RSS?
Related
Is it possible to remove the markup wiki language from the RSS feed and only show the article content?
Because I am using different template like info-boxes etc. and when people click the RSS link it show all the template markup and all the unnecessary coding that people don't really care. I been trying to find a good tutorial or help where I can accomplish this.
Screentshot
As Dereckson says, no, it's not possible. Feeds are just an alternate way to consume recent changes.
The ability to consume recent changes in parsed format essentially equates the feature request for visual diffs (HTML diffs). Will be possible at some point with Parsoid.
I need to collect data from a visitor in an HTML form and then have them print a document with the appropriate fields pre-populated. They'll need to have a couple of signatures on the document, so it has to be printed.
The paper form already exists, so one idea was to scan it in, with nothing filled out, as an image. I would then have the HTML form data print out using CSS for positioning and using the blank scanned form as a background image.
A better option, I would think, would be to automatically generate the PDF with this data, but I'm not sure how to accomplish either.
Suggestions and ideas would be greatly appreciated! =)
I would have to respectfully disagree with Osvaldo. Using CSS to align on a printed document would take ages to do efficiently in the aspect of cross-browser integration. Plus, if Microsoft comes out with a new browser, you're going to have to constantly update for the new use in browsers.
If you know any PHP (Which, if you know JavaScript and HTML, basic PHP is very simple), here's a good library you can use, FDPF:
Thankfully, PHP doesn't deprecate a whole lot of methods and the total code is less than 10 lines if you have to go in and change things around.
You can control printed documents acceptably well with CSS, so I would suggest you to try that option first. Because it's easier.
This is actually a great php library for converting HTML to PDF documents http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/ there are many demo's available on the site
XSL-FO is what I would recommend. XSL-FO (along with XSLT and XPath) is a sub-standard of XSL that was designed to be an abstract representation of a formatted document (that contains, text, graphic elements, fonts, styles, etc).
XSL-FO documents are valid xml documents, and there exist tools and apis that allow you to convert an XSL-FO documet to MS Word, PDF, RTF, etc. Depending on the technology you use, a quick google search will tell you what is available.
Here are a few links to help you get started with XSL-FO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects
http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/xslfo_intro.asp
http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl11/
I'm trying to incorporate a google news feed in my website (Using the built-in SimplePie functionality of WordPress).
However, the default feed gets rendered in a strange table structure. Sure enough, when I inspect the feed XML, I see that Google News has a whole bunch of table html as its 'description' element, complete with embedded styles, etc (See this example)- essentially dictating how the feed must be displayed, and not allowing for any effective css based customization.
This seems really dumb- can anyone help explain what is going on, or at least agree with me that this is just a terrible feed architecture?
Feeds often include html tags, as many (most?) readers will handle and use them, and that way the RSS provider can have some nice looking output in the reader, as you've guessed. (I prefer flagging it as CDATA unless it's proper xhtml, as it's not valid xml/rss otherwise). It's not in the original spirit of RSS perhapts, but the Google feed is just an extreme example of common practice. As per your problem, does strip_htmltags help (simplepie.org/wiki/reference/simplepie/strip_htmltags)?
I'm using System.Net.Mail to send an email message and want to make sure it appears properly from anything from a text-only cellphone to a rich client on Mac, Suse Linux/Evolution, or Windows.
I gather there are a few points to consider when sending a message with such a broad reach. Here is my list so far:
Plain text header: For text only clients, preface the entire message with plain text that says "to view this message click this link". This text should be readable even if the message hits the spam folder.
Layout: For the html portion of the message, should I use CSS or HTML Tables?
Doctype: What is the proper doctype to use XHTML, HTML5?
Images: What is the best image format to use? .. should I take any special considerations when embedding it? I'd prefer for the existence of an image to not give the message an "attachment" icon
MIME types: Is there any special MIME type I should use for the plain text or html part... or should I just preface the HTML with my text, and then hide that text with CSS style?
I'm sure there are more things to consider, or ways to rethink the above. What other items should I keep in mind when generating such an email that needs to understood by many devices?
This guide to css support is invaluable. In general, write your html like it's the year 2000. You'll be using a lot of tables for layout. CSS support is decent, but you have to use inline styles. That's because gmail strips styles in the header and no mail client links to external style sheets. The referenced guide does a great job of explaining all the guidelines.
As far as html and text, the best practice is to send them both. You do this by adding an alternate text view. See this article for an example. There are many such tutorials if you google "send html and text with .NET" or something similar.
This might sound trite, but if you want your email to display properly on any system, why not just send a plain-text email?
Is there some compelling feature of rich HTML that you really need?
Me, when a web site presents the option to choose text over HTML for their communications, I always choose plain text. It requires less bandwidth, is easier to read, doesn't have any obnoxious images, requires less processing power, etc etc.
If you only use the lowest common denominator, you will have the broadest device support.
That said, using multipart/alternative with a text/html part should work just fine on any reasonable device. The things not supporting HTML will display the text and the other devices will display the HTML. Use only a simple set of HTML - don't go overboard with fancy CSS features.
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?
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.
The point of RSS is to be display agnostic. You should not be putting style attributes on your feed.
I found this blog post that describes how to add style to your RSS feed.
Because RSS is (supposed to be) XML, you can use XML stylesheets.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-stylesheet/
The purpose of an RSS feed is to allow the easy transmission of content to places outside your site. The whole idea is that the content within the feed is format-free, so that it can be read by any piece of software. The program that is reading the your feed is in charge of how to present it visually. For example, if you had a website that read RSS, you would want to parse the feed into HTML, and style it that way. However, if you were building a desktop application to read the feed, you would implement the formatting quite differently.