CSS in RSS feeds

Richard Soderberg figured out how to include CSS in RSS feeds, and now Joi Ito is using the technique.

It’s a clever hack, but to me this negates one of the core values of RSS feeds, which is the separation of content from presentation. I want all my feeds to look the same when I go through them. Another big problem with including a CSS sheet in a feed is the Cascading part of CSS–in Joi’s case, his CSS overrides only certain parts of my own custom CSS, which looks fairly unholy.

Now that this Pandora’s box is open, I guess the thing I would highly suggest is for anybody who decides to do this to publish two feeds: One with your CSS and one without.

As Brent Simmons noted, this will probably put some pressure on feed readers to be able to turn off the included CSS feeds.