Among the other news from yesterday's Apple Developers Conference
keynote, it's interesting to note that apple picked the blue RSS icon and not the orange XML one to represent RSS (and Atom).
Even if I'm a long time orange icon user and fan, I think I can imagine
Apple thinking: "why using an icon with the word 'XML' to link to
something we call 'RSS'?". It's true: users are smart, but why making
their life harder?
For some time XML icons were popping up everywhere. They linked RSS
feeds but also other kind of XML files such as OPML blogrolls (oops, I
have just realized that I still have such an icon here) and I do agree
that it might have been confusing for users not living in our loop.
It's not that by choosing the blue icon Apple has closed all games but
they definetly made a significant step in one direction. Soon we will
see if users will start switching to the blue icon. Meanwhile I guess
I'll adopt both for my site.
Also, from the demo's I've seen, Safari should solve another issue:
users clicking on an RSS icon will not end up watching a page of code
anymore but should see a nicely displayed set of posts.
Cool.
comments: trackback: 
