Last week, I was wondering about how best to make RSS/Atom feeds available on CodeZoo so they’d be easy to find and use. (Jeffrey Veen was thinking about similar problems from another perspective, and while I like his ideas, I think the solution he proposes is very explicit and UI-heavy. Maybe that’s what’s needed, though — keep reading.) I originally thought the answer was to use the ugly little “RSS” icon, since RSS is the term people know. Then I found that the similarly ugly little “XML” icon was more commonly used on the sites in my bookmarks. I came down, eventually, in favor of that (hoping in part to avoid any silliness about whether Atom behind an RSS icon was somehow false advertising — spare me).
But then I noticed something about the sites using the “XML” icon: nearly all of them add some text right next to the icon, clarifying that by XML, they really mean RSS. In some cases, such as SFGate and Amazon, they devote entire pages to explaining what RSS is, before going ahead and using the XML icon. Oy, I ask you. What craziness is this? Using one obscure acronym to describe another obscure acronym…oy!
I’m nearly inclined to give up, and wait for the browsers to provide better UIs for autodiscovery (which Firefox already does, somewhat). But for CodeZoo’s needs, I don’t think that’s the right answer, either. I’m back to thinking the RSS icon is the right choice, with a brief sentence explaining the use of the icon for those who haven’t used RSS yet. Use the term that people know — RSS — and don’t force them to learn yet another new term — XML — along the way. I’d still love a better solution, though.