Der Blog

Yes that's right folks, you're now looking at a pure RSS blog! (Unless you're watching through SUCS Planet or something.)

How is this possible? It's all due to a very funky mechanism called Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), which lets you take some arbitrary XML data and present it in some other XML form. In this case the XSL stylesheet blog.xsl just turns an RSS file into the XHTML you are looking at right now. The best bit is that this is all done by your browser, so the only script I have to maintain for the blog is the one to generate the RSS file.

Of course, your browser has to support this. The two most popular browsers in the world, MSIE and Mozilla Firefox, both do this without a hitch (though making it work in Firefox is slightly more tricky as IE ignores some details to do with XML namespaces that make Firefox forget it's looking at XHTML). Opera, that other browser advocated by some fanatics of questionable intelligence, has no support whatsoever. Since the blog will be on SUCS Planet soon enough anyway, this shouldn't stop you reading it.