<p>You should be familiar with XSLT to be able to get it work.
The input of each XSLT stylesheet is a XML document fragment describing an RSS item.
The root element will be a <code>newspaper</code> element which will have contain one or more <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#whatIsRss">
RSS 2.0 <code>channel</code> elements</a> as children.
The subelements of the <code>channel</code> element depend on the information
provided by a particular RSS feed. This format is identical to that emitted by <a href="http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/help/1.0/newspapers/index.asp">FeedDemon's Newspaper Styles</a> which means all FeedDemon styles are valid RSS Bandit styles and vice versa.
</p>
<h3 id="elements">Elements</h3>
<p>The <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#requiredChannelElements">required base elements</a>
of the channel element are provided for custom formatting.
</p>
<p>
Besides the <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#hrelementsOfLtitemgt">subelements of the
<code>item</code> element</a> specified in the RSS 2.0 spec there may also be elements from other
namespaces which correspond to various RSS 2.0 modules. Brief descriptions of such modules and elements
The Slash RSS 1.0 module augments the RSS core and Dublin Core module's metadata with channel and item-level elements specific to <a href="http://slashcode.com/">SlashCode</a>-based sites</td></tr>
<td>ENT is provides a mechanism for describing how topic information can be introduced into an RSS 2.0 news feed</td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td></td></tr>
</table>
</p>
<h3 id="bestpractice">Best practice</h3>
<p>At first you have to enable the usage of a custom formatter within the options dialog: select the menu File|Options...
and then the tab named "Display". Ensure the checkbox "Use a custom formatter" is checked. Then play with the existing formatter
stylesheets.</p>
<!-- <p>If you are familar with the differences, or you have your own ideas born go back to the options dialog and check on the option "Formatter design mode".
This option is valid as long the progam is running. The next time you start Bandit, it is checked off again.
Now you can start editing the selected stylesheet with you favourite text editor. Each change will be immediatly active
if you select a feed's rss item to display. Errors are reported by a message box and the display switches back to a working internal
simple formatting temporary. Next time you have corrected the error, your stylesheet is used again.
</p>
<p>Additionally the input used by your stylesheet is saved each time you select an rss item to display to your
system temporary folder as a file named "RSSItem.xml" for your reference.
</p> -->
<p>Your stylesheet should produce valid (X)HTML. If you want to use CSS for visual effects, ensure to use it in
the embedded form to keep it with your formatting templates. Do not forget to insert an HTML <b><code>base</code> element</b>
within the HTML HEAD section to get relative links of images resolved by the browser control! The existing stylesheets can be used as examples as to how to generate this correctly for the different views. </p>
<p>There is support to split the css stylesheet to a separate file. If your formatter stylesheet
want to use that, you have to add these two prameters on the root level (child of <xsl:stylesheet>):
<xmp>
<xsl:param name='AppStartupPath'/>
<xsl:param name='AppUserDataPath'/>
</xmp>
<p>
They are filled by RssBandit to reflect:
<ul><li>AppStartupPath: the current path to the executable RssBandit.exe (C:\Program Files\RssBandit)
<li>AppUserDataPath: the path to the Application Data folder <br />
(usually C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\RssBandit)
