Yes, that is a pretty hard problem, i.e. how do you distinguish between JavaScript highlighting a source snippet and doing something that messes up your present

Yes, that is a pretty hard problem, i.e. how do you distinguish between JavaScript highlighting a source snippet and doing something that messes up your presentation? In the end, I don't think this would be worth the effort. Keep the feed reader simple enough, the real post is usually just a keypress away. My usage pattern in Google Reader is just pressing "v" to open a tab with that post for later referral (it's easy enough to modify firefox or chrome to do that in the background). Of course, if you have total control over your RSS generation and feel particularly perfectionist, you could always have some minimalistic features present in your feed, probably similar to your print CSS version. Bold and italic for syntax highlighting, for example.