Feed icon
Looks like Neil was a little ahead of the game when he adopted the Firefox feed icon because Microsoft has had a little chat with Mozilla and also adopted the Firefox feed icon (via Asa). I might adopt the icon myself when I get around to styling my site (don’t hold your breath).
This is what I like to see: cooperation between browser vendors to make things easier for users.
Hopefully now that there’s a consensus (at least between Mozilla and Microsoft) people will stop using those stupid orange RSS and XML icons.
I must say I’m quite looking forward to IE 7. I do hope it lives up to the hype and, most importantly, supports much more of CSS 2 (and fixes their CSS parser bugs).
December 17th, 2005 at 16:51 EST
Personally I like the orange icon, it’s visible and descriptive.
Plus the version in opera is slightly faded out and looks nicer. Can you point me at an example of the firefox one then?
December 17th, 2005 at 19:05 EST
It looks a bit like the one to be used in IE7. See the Subscribe to the web feed icon on Neil’s World, or Google it (bearing in mind that it’s now in the address bar).
I like the orange icon too. Did you even read the article? All the icons under discussion are orange.
But to respond to your point, those RSS icons may be descriptive (the XML ones sure as hell aren’t) but have you considered that the average user doesn’t know what RSS is?
Feeds (of which RSS are several formats for) is a very powerful concept that could be very useful to a great many non-technical people. For widespread non-technical adoption it needs to be as simple and straight-forward as possible. Jargon like RSS does not help.
December 17th, 2005 at 21:03 EST
Jargon needs to be learnt. Most people had no clue what a URL was originally, now it’s everywhere.
December 18th, 2005 at 02:14 EST
Why does jargon need to be learnt?
December 18th, 2005 at 23:16 EST
otherwise it wouldn’t exist
December 18th, 2005 at 23:37 EST
You make a convincing argument.
January 5th, 2006 at 01:49 EST
Jargon would exist if it wasn’t learnt, it just wouldn’t be usd. I may choose to call a cow a ‘thripp’. That would be my own bit of jargon.
The real name for something isn’t jargon, it’s the name.