Rogers Cadenhead: I’ve adopted the icon on Workbench
this afternoon, because I think it could spark greater adoption of
syndication with the general public
To date, I’ve avoided the garish orange icon because quite
frankly, I always thought it was ugly. I prefer a less
graphic intensive page.
Until recently, I’ve allowed myself two images: 119 byte
one blue and white pinstripe at the top of the page, and a 1420
byte Atom icon as I both support the effort and it matches my color
scheme.
Once Firefox 1.5
makes it into the
default Ubuntu
install, I may look into replacing both with SVG or Canvas,
along with the poorly pixelated curves on my post titles.
Anyway, I thought I would look into the syndication icon.
As I do with most things, I approached this with an eye towards
standards and an ability to work with Firefox. It seemed to
make sense to use CSS and
data: URIs to
minimize the change to each page, and to minimize the number of
requests to the server.
Even so, the orange still seemed to scream out “look at
me!”, “look at me!”. I know that
some say “the feed icon
is recognizable enough that it doesn’t need to be restricted
to one colour.”, but I don’t want to go there.
So I progressively selected smaller and smaller versions until I
found I could tolerate the result.
At which point, I started to think about degrading gracefully
for backlevel browsers. As always, these days that means
IE. The requirements are for a PNG with a transparent
background, CSS2, and data URIs.
That’s when it hit me. I had defaced my page (OK,
admittedly strong words for a page that doesn’t look all that
great to begin with), but the defacing would generally be only seen
by people who were running browsers that already support
autodiscovery.
Feh.
So while all this may end up getting backed out, I decided to do
something productive. Like adopting the feed icon as the
favicon for the
Feed Validator.
I like the adoption of the icon on FeedValidator.
After a few days of looking at the orange blibbet, I’m thinking that it needs to be accompanied by text when used on a web page. Microsoft will be using the tooltip text “Subscribe” when it’s a button in MSIE and Outlook.
The idea of the standard icon is not to tag anything that has to do with feeds, but to be put it in browser chrome when a feed is discovered. A favicon is also in browser chrome, in a place that can easily be confused for the autodiscovery icon in Firefox (i.e. left side of location bar vs. right side). Using that icon as the Feed Validator’s favicon is just plain confusing.
Hm. Don’t you think it’s kinda confusing to suddenly have the same icon pop up in the left side of the location bar? Isn’t this icon supposed to mean ‘Feed found! Click here to subscribe!’ or something like that?
Oh, please no. I’m not all that delighted about the rush to stick browser chrome in page content, where it will behave completely differently (the equivalent of using a browser “Add Bookmark” icon to link to your site’s home page), but I’m willing to bow to the inevitable. But sticking browser chrome in browser chrome? Unless you’re doing it as an object lesson in how we shouldn’t have moved autodiscovery to the addressbar, or shouldn’t allow site content into the addressbar from favicons, that’s just begging for confusion.
I kinda-sorta like it, but frankly, I think any favicon would work fine for the validator. You’re not going to be subscribing to the feedvalidator, so it doesn’t really matter that much I don’t think.
Unless you’re doing it as an object lesson in how we shouldn’t have moved autodiscovery to the addressbar, ...
Now that you mention it, if FeedValidator had an autodiscoverable feed, it would have the blibbet on the Firefox address bar twice, but only one could be clicked.
I’m guessing that would kill every usability guru who saw it.
I agree with everyone who says that using it as a favicon is inviting confusion.
And further, I think sticking the icon on a link that points to a page with feeds on it is semantically broken anyway. If you put it in page content at all, it should be on links to actual feeds, not on any old link that points to something that has even remotely to do with feeds.
Rogers Cadenhead: I’ve adopted the icon on Workbench this afternoon, because I think it could spark greater adoption of syndication with the general public. Sam Ruby: I decided to do something productive. Like adopting the feed icon as the...
Works for me: intarwebnet law requires that someone mention red-green colorblindness, but hey, they’re quite used to having to remember the meaning of relative object position already.
WATCHING PAINT DRY HAS NEVER BEEN MORE EXCITING!
If they haven’t already, someone really ought to create a wiki page for “Design for the bike shed.” It’d be a handy pointed link, and therapy as you add a few more baroque features, all in one.
Subtitle: Boring weblogging minutiæ noone cares about. Subsubtitle: Redundant qualifications. Where was I? Ah, yes. There has been some pondering about that orange blob lately. Here’s what I did on plasmasturm.org: a[type="application/atom+xml"] {...