extremely important? i use rss a lot and i have never seen anyone do this
This is exactly my point: everyone here is tech-savvy and knows what to do with an RSS/Atom link. So we don't see a need for XSLT.
But someone who hasn't seen/used an RSS reader will see a wall of plain-text gibberish (or a prompt to download the wall of gibberish).
XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into something that can still be viewed.
I think RSS/Atom are key technologies for the open web, and discovery is extremely important. Cancelling XSLT is going in the wrong direction (IMHO).
I've done a bunch of things to try to get people to use XSLT in their feeds: https://www.rss.style/
You can see it in action on an RSS feed here (served as real XML, not HTML): https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml
This is exactly my point: everyone here is tech-savvy and knows what to do with an RSS/Atom link. So we don't see a need for XSLT.
But someone who hasn't seen/used an RSS reader will see a wall of plain-text gibberish (or a prompt to download the wall of gibberish).
XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into something that can still be viewed.
I think RSS/Atom are key technologies for the open web, and discovery is extremely important. Cancelling XSLT is going in the wrong direction (IMHO).
I've done a bunch of things to try to get people to use XSLT in their feeds: https://www.rss.style/
You can see it in action on an RSS feed here (served as real XML, not HTML): https://www.fileformat.info/news/rss.xml