How tough would it be... 

Much as I like and appreciate the efficiency of reading blogs in the aggregator, when I heard Hil and Jeneane Sessum say they miss having people visit the site, I have some sympathy for that viewpoint too.

My reasons are more like Hil's. I spend a lot of effort making my homes on the web all comfy, placing throw pillows around, bringing in fresh flowers. When readers only see my posts in an aggregator, it's like they are coming to a meeting in a bare little interrogation room instead of sitting in my living room in the best chair and sipping a cup of tea.

So. Here's what I'm wondering: how hard would it be to make an aggregator that picks up the CSS of the blog, backgrounds and all, and styles each post accordingly within the aggregator? Wouldn't that be kind of cool?

This happens already in HTML aggregators, if styles are done at the tag level, except for backgrounds and logos and things. So you'd have to somehow go out and grab the external styles, put the body styles in a container div, and... oh how should I know?!

No wait. Maybe this would work better: make the blogger responsible for it, not the aggregator. In some systems, like Expression Engine, the CMS I use at work, I can make any number of templates delivering the same news items, and I think a corresponding RSS feed is created for each separate view of the content. I might play around with that when I'm on vacation next week. And maybe I'll do a mockup based on a NewsRiver screen cap tonight to show you what I'm talking about.