Sometimes something unexpected gets you to pick up the book and learn something new. XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) was just one of those things that I could not get motivated for. I knew enough of the basics to let me do what I sometimes needed to do but there it stopped.
Until FeedDemon came along and you can manipulate the way atom/rss feeds are presented to you through the XSL based styles. And suddenly you are motivated to really understand what XSL can do for you and you get cranking away at it. The way FeedDemon uses XSL is cool, really cool. Nick Bradbury demonstrates that again today with a new style that is only about 20 lines of XSL and let you read your newspaper in yet another way.
I haven't much to show for yet publicly, but I would never have thought that I would be happily writing a few hundred lines of XLS to find news items that should be displayed together based on some heuristics...
Posted by Werner Vogels at April 29, 2004 09:13 PM