RSS Branding
From the wall street journal via Infectious Greed:
Some argue that one hurdle to wider use of RSS is the arcane acronym itself. Microsoft has tentatively used the term “Web feeds” as an alternative, a move that has prompted criticism from a few purists in the blogosphere. Google and others, meanwhile, have used the term “feeds.”
I completely agree with this - RSS has several acronyms for different flavours of the same purpose, along with CDF and ATOM. Someone wanting to subscribe to feeds must look for an orange logo containing the words “RSS” or XML within an image (how does that help you if you are visually impaired!), a blue logo of the same, the text “RSS”, the text “syndicate”, the text “feed”, the text “atom” or in the rare case where the publisher actually gets the technology and has bothered to put in a
tag indicating an RSS feed exists on this page, the browser. Further confusing things, some publishers (or their heinous software, like this blog’s template uses at the time of writing) use a feed: URI scheme - a real sign the authors don’t get URIs (much as written why feed: URIs are bad).
Try to explain what RSS means to your mother (assuming she doesn’t write optimizing compilers for sun) and the numereous ways of finding them on a web page. At least Atom is not an acronym so not immediately rejectable as a recognizable term to people.
The next steps to making RSS work are:
- Validators should reject feeds and user agents warn about feeds that summarize HTML pages if the HTML pages in turn don’t have both a
- depracating RSS in favor of Atom, and removing all RSS feeds from the web. User agents should at least warn they are obsolete.
- Maybe a practice of no anchors to feeds from html
- Get rid of the useless feed: URI scheme. Its confusing.
- Things must be very usable - the user agent must let users know if there is a feed for the page they are looking at - the users can’t be expected to hunt for the words “rss” or an orange logo. It should just work.
Technorati Tags: RSS, Syndication