July 18, 2025
On a whim, I decided to style my RSS feed just so if someone clicks on the link they'll get something other than the default view for raw XML.
I looked up how to do XSLT, put together a partial template, fixed my XML mistakes, and viewed it by dragged my local copy of the feed into the browser. Nothing changed.
After making sure I'd typed everything correctly and hadn't typoed the name of the XSLT file when I referenced it in the feed, I checked the dev console. It was throwing a CORS error. For a file on my desktop trying to talk to another file on my desktop.
Now, CORS is useless anyway, there's no actual security involved. It's just a way to (barely) keep honest devs honest. But telling me I'm not allowed to view one local file from another is just asinine.
So I gave up. Dicking around with this stupid little bit of security theater isn't worth the hassle, nor is logging into my host's site manager and doing the upload-reload dance until everything works right. Hopefully anyone who clicks on a link labelled "Atom/RSS Feed" knows what to expect, 'cause that's all they're going to get.
