Scroll down and you'll see this bookmaker's odds on the Governor of California Special Election 2003. Schwarzenegger is the hands down favorite with 1/10 odds. Bustamante comes in 20 times worse at 2/1. They also put the chances of the recall failing at 4/1. Blogger Georgy Russel has the same 100 to 1 odds as pornographer Larry Flynt, without the publishing empire. Gary Coleman, 500/1. It'll be wicked fun watching odds change until October 7.

Has anyone seen an active Bustamante for Governor campaign site?

Garrett Gruener is one of the founders of Ask Jeeves.

Platform so far:

• Fix the budget
• Education
• Green technology

[a klog apart public policy]

Something came up on the syndication syntax list that bothers me. Syndication (RSS for now, Atom next) depends on separating formatting from content. A lump of html is thrown into an xml wrapper and passed along.

What happens to the original style sheets and the styled treatment of the post? Newsreaders today never know about them (a page's header isn't syndicated), so all custom class attributes are ignored.

This may be more important with Atom. With extensibility, we will syndicate more highly structured content (xml'ized invoices, recipes, sports scores, etc) that require more sophisticated help in layout and presentation.

Two strategies come to mind.

(a) Include the urls for relevant style sheets with each syndicated post. Let the newsreaders parse the post for styles they want to use, and incorporate by reference.  A nice thing here is that as a style sheet is updated, content already delivered is updated too.  or

(b) Pre-process the html before syndication. The publisher changes style sheet references into inline CSS, then writes out the RSS file.

Jesse James Garrett said:

I'd advocate a variant of (a):

• Encourage publishers to create a separate stylesheet unique to their
  syndicated content, rather than having aggregators pull styles from the
  stylesheets for the corresponding Web sites. (Maybe a media="feed"
  attribute on the stylesheet link could indicate this.)
• Specify the stylesheet URL at the feed level. This cuts down on the
  potential redundant data in the feed.
• Support cascading. Allow post-level and inline CSS.

(b) is far less attractive. It'll bloat the feeds, and it'll be a big
hassle for the publishers to support.

I know you're all familiar with RSS, and suspect you've been following Echo's evolution. Am I understanding the problem? Are there other approaches I haven't considered? Does strategy (a) or (b) come to mind as the superior approach?

[a klog apart]