Posted by Andy Dingley on 01/25/35 11:54

Scott Gordo wrote:

> I've got some Press Releases in an xml file I'm posting to a number of
> different sites. I set it up as an RSS feed using
> RSS-to-Javascript.com.

This is a bogus approach, that came into being out of need and a narrow
gap in the technology low-hanging fruitbasket.

RSS has nothing to do with JavaScript and has no business being in
JavaScript. It's a static data format, not an executable. really you
ought to process inbound RSS on your server and serve it up as some
other data format for outbound (probably HTML). However this is hard
and there's an obvious demand for a simple "Just give it to me so I can
put in on MySpace" solution.

You can't have cross-server SSI, <iframe> is a bit limited even though
it's happily cross-server, but you can easily have cross-server
JavaScript. This is where these RSS-to-Javascript.com sites come in.
It's a hack, not an elegant hack, but it is a pragmatic and useful
hack.

OTOH, I think they're going to get squeezed soon, possibly squeezed out
of existence. Cross-site scripting attacks are a risk, and anything
that smells too much like phishing is likely to get itself firewalled
out pretty soon.


> Can someone point me to a (concise) site/book/whatever that explains
> how the RSS-to-Javascript thing works (or some other equivalent method)

- Take RSS from outside
- Load the RSS as XML (tricky!)
- Use XSLT (or other favourite tool) to transform the RSS into a
JavaScript program that does a lot of document.write()s of the
resultant content.
- Link the static "consumer" page to the generated script with a
simple
<script src="..." ></script> element.


> so that I can take a crack at setting it up myself?

If you're going to "set it up yourself", then don't set that up, set up
something better.

Rather than transforming RSS to HTML-embedded-in-JavaScript, just turn
RSS into HTML directly, then use it directly in your page. If you have
minor coding skill and a web host that allows some simple scripting,
you can do this. PHP is the entry-level for it and I'm sure there are
example scripts around.

Also search the obvious Usenet group archives, as we've discussed this
many times.

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