Via Scripting News, Deane asks whether RSS aggregators should strip style attributes (presumably, this would also apply to aggregators of Atom/Echo/whatever the RSS successor format is called as well).
Count me in the minority that wants my feeds presented as the author provided, within limits (“I wants my funk uncut”). There is semantic meaning carried in tags like <strong>, <em>, and <pre> that would render some posts meaningless. That said, I hate feeds that render as white text but don’t have the dark background specified in their page’s body tag to make the post readable. Maybe if everyone moved to using CSS stylesheets and classes instead of local CSS styles or <font> tags, preserving styles would be OK.
In fact, let’s go a step further: CSS compliant styles should be rendered by aggregators; old-skool HTML styles should be stripped. How’s that for incentive to learn the new technology?