Image alignment in 2.6 messing up in RSS feed

Because there is an organisation named W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) that makes standards for how the web is supposed to be coded – if people actually bothered following the standards, there wouldn’t be thousands of badly coded webpages out there that breaks in other browsers than specific versions of Internet Explorer etc.

Opera and Firefox are good examples of browsers that do a decent job of pertaining to the standards.

Deprecated tags and inline styling of HTML-elements is preferably to be avoided. Inline styling is perfectly valid use of the “style”-tag, but should preferably be put in an external CSS-file, so as to simplify the HTML and ease the changing of styles at later stages.

Styling of a RSS-feed should not be done, simple as that. This is not something WordPress has done – they’ve just taken away the automatic support for a deprecated styling-tag, and that is a good thing. Of course people who’s gotten used to the tag complains, and want it back – I for one don’t. There are probably other ways of getting this through in the feeds, but I don’t see the point – an RSS feed is not supposed to look like the webpage – nor the post itself, for that matter. An RSS-feed is supposed to take the content of the site, and present it in a simple, text-only matter.

I do not remember the original specification right now, but I wonder if there wasn’t even an initial support for images in the feeds, although I might be mistanken regarding that.

I for one would love to have styles in feeds. The author is putting thought into how the article is presented, where the picture goes etc. And yes, I really would like the article to be presented that way in my feedreader, not in a crappy text view. I know there are some people that would rather have an article without any pictures and with a monospaced font so it takes us back to the typewriter days. But that just is not very readable!

I totally agree that the styling preferrably should be in an external css file. But as far as I know, there are no possibility to send this with a feed so far. Maybe this would be a good addition to the RSS standard ??

I agree that something like this should be done in a very clear way with advice how to get it working the way it should work. Just taking it out like it has been done now makes a lot of frustration and can seem a bit arrogant for the normal users. This is something that forces all template authors to update their templates.

Is it possible to code the float part into the css and make it work?

Steve

Worse comes to worst you could always use a desktop application like Blogdesk or Windows Live Writer, which will happily stylize the images for you so they show up properly in feeds as well, standards be damned.

I think a compromise might be in order by allowing a MINIMAL of styling, just enough to align text and images properly. The fact is most avid feed users use Bloglines or Google Reader which both convert the styling of content even if they shouldn’t have, creating a demand for rich content even in feeds. When I check my feeds, I can see images, text and even embedded videos, and though it may not be standardized, it’s still far better than loading an entire website to view the same content. While W3C may have meant feeds to be text only, the reality makes that impossible. Eventually the standards will have to change to adapt to the growing use of feeds and the expectation that such feeds should have rich, stylized content as well.

Actually, I found a better solution:

When writing a post in WordPress and embedding an image, go through the normal process of embedding it as usual. Once it’s embedded, click on the image and then click on the icon on the top left within the image allowing you to edit it even further.

A menu will open up. Click on Advanced Settings. Voila, you can now style and change the borders, hspace, vspace, change the CSS classes, change the size and even stylize any links associated with it without ever having to dig into the HTML. Isn’t TinyMCE wonderful? =D

It’s an added step, but it’s still far better than the alternative of having to manually edit it in HTML.

See this bug – 2.5 removed “align=right”, and now 2.6 has removed “float: right” from the feed.

In the bug, I have asked Otto what the best step forward would be for people who wish to regain this feature.

His response:

While I still think that is a very bad idea to include styles in feeds, I admit that it does work in the current situation… The ideal of “feeds should be text + minimal HTML only” is not something the world is ready to cope with.

What it looks like to me is that we need a feed-only filter to recognize the alignleft/alignright classes and add the style = floats in there in that case.

This is complicated due to captioning, I think, which now gets the styling for alignleft/right.

It gets even worse . . . for those of us using justified images. I both left and right justify images. I have no beef with left justify, it seems to work fine, adding hspace (l/r margin) around the image and centering the caption, but the left align SUCKS. Not only does it NOT center the caption, it also doesn’t add hspace.

Where is the consistency here? I had to fiddle and I HATE having to fiddle when the programming should handle this consistently.

ElfN

Can anyone guide me on how to get images in a post to show up in the feed?
I have tried 4-5 different plugins and nothing works. Make me think that is something in the settings that I have to do or something. In old posts in doesn’t pick up any image and also tried it creating new posts.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. For faster assistance please email me at [email protected]

Joe-