There you go. Again.
This debate is about how simple you can go with an icon that the world would soon embrace and adopt, just like the world adopted the unread mail icon. Why soon? Because Internet Explorer—for the first time—will show this unique, attractive and distractive icon in the address bar in its upcoming version 7 and 7+. (And I mean distractive in a good way, to let users know that a channel is available for subscription.)
IE team adopted this icon, originally by Firefox team in an unselfish effort to bring an order and a common understanding for the benefit of normal users.
Unlike a folded envelope that quite clearly identifies with an unread mail, even in an offline sense—as in your postal mail, delivered by your friendly neighborhood postman in all his flesh and blood—there is no real life counterpart to a syndicated XML feed. Hence the hesitation, variation, labels, icons, all not too clearly depicting XML as simply an icon.
The tip of a beacon emitting waves is as close as you can get to something live and something in continuous broadcast. Like the radio. You tune in to a channel you like and lock it in with a channel number in your car stereo, so when you press back the number, you’d get the channel you want to listen to. That’s subscription and that’s all there is to it. Why should feed be any different?
Ask today an average radio user, if it makes any difference choosing between AM or FM. Ask any television user if she cares about which types of broadcasts her television can receive. Tell me if you don’t get a cold hard stare back. That’s because the number of bands and types of broadcast that a normal Television can serve is phenomenal. And yet, we cannot digest the fact that syndicated feed is essentially XML. What flavor, which type, what attachment? Who among users really wants to know?
Just when we begin to like this simple concept of a unique icon and begin to get used to it, people, who are capable of influencing a large group of readers, begin to rear their geeky heads. Like Khoi Vinh of New York Times in this post about the need to have a flavor label.
I like this icon, but it has its shortcomings: First, it too neatly sidesteps the issue of what flavor of XML feed it’s representing, which would require, in some instances, that it be accompanied by a text label. No standards or guidelines exist for such text labels, as far as I know. And second, even with a text label, it can be fairly diminutive on a page, causing it to get overlooked easily.
Six months ago, I thought the graphic was limiting too in its representation, but for altogether different reasons. The simplicity of it all has been sinking in ever since.
Why can we not follow the television model? We want the media. We don’t want to know what kind of signal it receives or how many combined colors each ray has when it hits the screen.
The segregation and labeling will probably exist only as long as clients (as in software) are yet to support all mainstream syndication formats and output seamlessly to the reader. Today, do you even bother to read a spec for the kinds of bands your TV supports before buying? In the same breath, do you really think about SW1, SW2—(shortwave radio transmissions) switches that came with old radios—anymore?
We had a similar and a very constructive discussion before at Jeffrey Veen’s blog about usability of subscribing to feeds, and I am of the opinion that if software (browser in this case) does the job, then we don’t have to.
(These are transitional times, and people ten years down the memory lane would probably look at us as those idiots who were squabbling over an iconic representation of XML. But they are important today for the world to look back at us that way later on.
My own page shows my feed link aligning with a particular flavor right now and I intend to change that—visually—and offer a simple proposed feed icon instead. By the way, I also offer a page full of explanation about what feeds really are, and how to use them. I am hoping that browsers will take care of that as well, so that I don’t have to.)