Ok guys, with all of the improvements to the feed system in 4.7, I have one more suggestion to really wrap things up and help Drupal to be forward thinking in this area. There is a new push to standardize the RSS icon, and if you haven't heard, Microsoft, has adopted the *same* icon as Mozilla, that little orange icon. Yes, it's true, something *both* browsers will share in common. Wow, progress, at last! Read more about that here: http://mattbrett.com/archives/2005/12/the-new-standard-feed-icon/ So I motion that we do this for the final release of 4.7, that we include this new icon by default and get rid of the crummy XML icon. If you read that above article, it makes a lot of sense, does the term "XML" mean anything but to developers? We could certainly adopt either an orange or blue icon (could be theme specific, I'll leave that up to guys) but here is the link for icons: http://feedicons.com/ This is not so much a patch but a change in icons so I wanted to throw this out there. If everyone agrees, we can create an issue and get this committed. It should be trivial to implement, but as Drupal 4.7 sites are widely deployed next year, the affects of this icon will be much more impressive. And speaking of which, to go along with this, I think we should throw in a patch that puts this icon in a promiment place, instead of merely at the bottom of the page. Perhaps we can throw this at the top of feed pages (top of the node page for example). Still leave it themeable but change the default a bit. Just my 2 cents. Happy Holidays all! ted (aka m3avrck)
Theodore Serbinski wrote:
And speaking of which, to go along with this, I think we should throw in a patch that puts this icon in a promiment place, instead of merely at the bottom of the page. Perhaps we can throw this at the top of feed pages (top of the node page for example).
Top of the page is way too prominent. Research shows that the current norms for rss icons are unusable: http://www.catalystgroupdesign.com/people/press/blogpress.asp. The best web-only subscription I've seen is Feedburner feeds. Doing that would be something I'd like to see wait for 4.8.b On my personal sites I hide it entirely and rely on the browser picking it up (I figure this is fine since my audience is technical and many use Firefox or Safari, but I haven't checked the stats really). -- Neil Drumm http://delocalizedham.com/
Op vrijdag 23 december 2005 22:15, schreef Neil Drumm:
On my personal sites I hide it entirely and rely on the browser picking it up (I figure this is fine since my audience is technical and many use Firefox or Safari, but I haven't checked the stats really).
Yup. Feeds trough 'icons' or buttons is just plain silly. It is unfriendly, It requires users to jump trough hoops (copy-pasting and the likes). I know IE does not support it. I know IE is approx 100% of the market share. But still, having it as metadata in drupals header is (imo) more then enough. I vote for removing all ugly XML or RSS icons. Anywhere in Drupal (and leave it to themes if they insist to add them). Bèr -- PGP ber@webschuur.com http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_webschuur.asc PGP berkessels@gmx.net http://www.webschuur.com/sites/webschuur.com/files/ber_gmx.asc
I'm of the opposite mind. Leaving IE users adrift re RSS seems unnecessary and hardly in the user-friendly spirit. Besides, I'm sure I'm not the only one who prefers to use Thunderbird or a newsreader to manage feeds, and the autodiscovery does nothing for that purpose. (Firefox requires me to create a live bookmark just so I can copy the feed address and paste it into another client, so then I can delete the live bookmark.) I consider it only common courtesy to offer up a feed link that is a visual offer for website visitors, and can be copied and pasted into a different program. (Also, if you want to pull a feed into your own Drupal site's aggregator, the autodiscover will not help you, either.) What's more, the taxonomy feeds could be confusing to the website visitor as most sites do not have autodiscoverable feeds of their tagged content. Would the average web visitor even think to consider that live bookmarking a display of posts on "Christmas", for example, would not bookmark the entire site's feed? While it would be nice to have more control over how and where the feed icons appear, I think 86ing them altogether to suit a personal aesthetic would be unfortunate. Maybe I'm wrong, but most people implementing Drupal I believe would be looking for them. Laura Bèr Kessels wrote:
Op vrijdag 23 december 2005 22:15, schreef Neil Drumm:
On my personal sites I hide it entirely and rely on the browser picking it up (I figure this is fine since my audience is technical and many use Firefox or Safari, but I haven't checked the stats really).
Yup. Feeds trough 'icons' or buttons is just plain silly. It is unfriendly, It requires users to jump trough hoops (copy-pasting and the likes).
I know IE does not support it. I know IE is approx 100% of the market share. But still, having it as metadata in drupals header is (imo) more then enough.
I vote for removing all ugly XML or RSS icons. Anywhere in Drupal (and leave it to themes if they insist to add them).
Bèr
I'm not the only one who prefers to use Thunderbird or a newsreader to manage feeds, and the autodiscovery does nothing for that purpose.
I agree with Laura. We can't presume to know the method of subscription access in any reader because, quite frankly, it's a mess. First, there was the XML icon. Then there was the Radio Userland coffee mug. Then I added the AmphetaDesk icon. Then a bunch more readers added their own version. Then there was the meta data in the header. Then there was middlemen for all the different access methods. Then there was the discussion about feed:. And still, there's no agreement. I know every time I see a site without a right-clickable XML icon, I view source to look for the headers, and copy/paste that way. Whilst *I* can do that, and will continue to do that, I wouldn't presume that every visitor to every Drupal site ever would know to do so. And yes, Thunderbird is the best RSS reader I've ever used. -- Morbus Iff ( you shouldn't have come here ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
Sure! Great (IMO) Op zaterdag 24 december 2005 01:58, schreef Morbus Iff:
because, quite frankly, it's a mess. First, there was the XML icon. Then there was the Radio Userland coffee mug. Then I added the AmphetaDesk icon. T ...And still, there's no agreement.
No. That (please do not start that thread here) semantic web has been waiting. RSS got usa little closer, but not even close to what it really is.
I know every time I see a site without a right-clickable XML icon, I view source to look for the headers, and copy/paste that way. Whilst *I* can do that, and will continue to do that, I wouldn't presume that every visitor to every Drupal site ever would know to do so.
So. Who (?) should fix this for you? 1) The desktop 2) the feedreader 3) the web-application 4) a 3rd party (googleQuick et al) (i ,personallly, did not put #1 on #1 for nothing. IMO we can invent cool webbased stuff, or browser stuff; the desktop is the place where it all happes, in the end. Bèr -- | Bèr Kessels | webschuur.com | website development | | Jabber & Google Talk: ber@jabber.webschuur.com | http://bler.webschuur.com | http://www.webschuur.com |
So. Who (?) should fix this for you?
That is not me to decide - I've been a member of each one of the raging debates behind the approaches, but I can certainly tell you one thing: forcing the end-user to support only our ("our" being an in-core approach) solution gives *grief* to the solution by users who don't (yet?) support it. The only joy it will bring is from those whose solution we chose. I'm fine with replacing the orange XML icon with the new one, even though *I know we'll get questions for months and months on what the hell it is*. I am not fine, however, with removing the icon entirely. -- Morbus Iff ( you are nothing without your robot car, NOTHING! ) Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
The basic suggestion was this: 1. Autofeeds work great (I agree Ber) *but* there are tons of cases when one needs an actual link to the feed so they can past it in other feed aggregators, etc, so we *need* an icon or a link to this feed 2. The current XML icon is ok but as this article suggests, having more of a standard icon benefits everyone 3. This was a *forward* looking approach, obviously people might not understand what it means, but it's not like they understand the current XML icon either. However, there is a push to more or less standardize this icon and with MS committing to using this icon in IE7 (and FF already using it), obviously this will *soon* become well known However, based on these points, maybe Neil said it best, probably should wait till the next release of Drupal to actually incorporate this, although I see no reason at all to wait... Food for thought, regardless. ted
Hi, On Saturday 24 December 2005 06:47, Theodore Serbinski wrote:
However, based on these points, maybe Neil said it best, probably should wait till the next release of Drupal to actually incorporate this, although I see no reason at all to wait...
I've submitted a patch at http://drupal.org/node/42234 Please vote for your support to get this implemented sooner rather than later. Best regards. Frank
On 12/24/05, Laura Scott <laura@pingv.com> wrote:
I'm of the opposite mind. Leaving IE users adrift re RSS seems unnecessary and hardly in the user-friendly spirit. Besides, I'm sure I'm not the only one who prefers to use Thunderbird or a newsreader to manage feeds, and the autodiscovery does nothing for that purpose. (Firefox requires me to create a live bookmark just so I can copy the feed address and paste it into another client, so then I can delete the live bookmark.) I consider it only common courtesy to offer up a feed link that is a visual offer for website visitors, and can be copied and pasted into a different program. (Also, if you want to pull a feed into your own Drupal site's aggregator, the autodiscover will not help you, either.)
Hi, This has been raised as a bug in Firefox, with a large number of votes already. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254871 On the bug there is a comment suggesting the LiveLines extension as a workaround for the problem. http://heygom.com/extensions/ Another related feature request suggests adding drag-and-drop support to the RSS feed icon. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=270541 Back on topic, I'm not convinced that using the same icon is a good idea, as it will mean the same icon exists in the browser and on the web page, yet the functionality behind them will differ. I'm not looking forward to explaining that to Auntie Mable. Also, I worry that MS adopting the same icon could end up being another case of embrace and extend. We may end up with IE using an orange icon for normal feeds, and a blue icon for "web feeds 2.0" that have embedded XAML or something else. A possible solution to both of these concerns is to have a tiny client side useragent sniffer that adds a CSS class to disable the icon for browsers known to have automatic RSS feed detection. -- John
Bèr Kessels a écrit :
I know IE is approx 100% of the market share.
It seems you live under a rock or something. IE is around 80-85% now on "general" (lambda/joe users) websites. On some more "technical" websites, IE is even only in second place, around 40%. And there are dozens of new browsers now (cell phones etc) Just ask Google if you dont beleive it. Just 2 quick links below (english and french : Europe and US have quite different views) http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox40_browser_market_firefox_growin... http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement12.asp Ch.
I was skeptical at first, since the last time I looked, MS IE was going strong. However, checking two web site with different audience, here are the stats from December: Normal audience site (non techie, non computer savvy): MS IE 82.2% FireFox 8.5% Unknown 4.2% (crawlers?) Mozilla 1.4% Safari 1.1% (others with less than 1% each) Techie site: MS IE 63.2% FireFox 22.2% Unknown 5.4% (crawlers?) Safari 3.1% Mozilla: 1.9% Opera: 1.6% (others with less than 1% each) On 1/3/06, Christophe Chisogne <christophe@publicityweb.com> wrote:
Bèr Kessels a écrit :
I know IE is approx 100% of the market share.
It seems you live under a rock or something. IE is around 80-85% now on "general" (lambda/joe users) websites. On some more "technical" websites, IE is even only in second place, around 40%. And there are dozens of new browsers now (cell phones etc)
Just ask Google if you dont beleive it. Just 2 quick links below (english and french : Europe and US have quite different views)
http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox40_browser_market_firefox_growin...
http://www.xitimonitor.com/etudes/equipement12.asp
Ch.
Neil Drumm wrote:
Top of the page is way too prominent. Research shows that the current norms for rss icons are unusable: http://www.catalystgroupdesign.com/people/press/blogpress.asp.
Thanks for posting this link, Neil. That's some sobering research, especially for those who think blogs are the greatest tool since the hammer and/or who are such technical brains that stuff like RSS, trackback, free tagging, etc. are boring and mundane. ..chrisxj
participants (10)
-
Bèr Kessels -
Chris Johnson -
Christophe Chisogne -
John Vandenberg -
Khalid B -
Laura Scott -
Morbus Iff -
naudefj -
Neil Drumm -
Theodore Serbinski