[development] the new standard RSS icon

[John Vandenberg]

On 12/24/05, Laura Scott <laura at 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