Design Meme

If you’re subscribing to the feed for the site, you’ll see some changes today as I’ve started using Feedburner to add some extra features. The feed is now translated on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with the feed reader you’re using. CSS is also used to change the feed into something a little nicer looking when you preview it in your browser.

I’m happy to see the term “feed” being used more frequently and acronyms like XML, RSS, ATOM (is that an acronym?), RDF and so on being used less. Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla team led sums it up nicely:

I’m encouraged that we’re further distancing browsers from the awful “RSS” as a feature name and icon identifyer. We don’t call web pages “HTML+CSS+JavaScript Pages” and we don’t identify them in the browser using little icons containing “HTML” and “CSS” acronyms; We shouldn’t do it for feeds either.

So we’re beginning to see people standardize on the term “feed” and even on the image used to represent a feed. The Internet Explorer team has decided to use the same icon as you see in Firefox, and FeedIcons.com is providing a wide assortment of graphic formats to help encourage it’s use.