Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

The orange XML icon sucks

I’m not a fan of the orange XML icon, even though I use it on my categories page. I love the concept of a universally recognised icon for RSS feeds, but XML is simply the wrong acronym to put on it. Don’t think it’s liable to cause confusion? Check out this excerpt from Journalism.co.uk (emphasis mine):

The Guardian is planning to launch more XML-based services in the next few months, adding to the news feed services the site already provides to both commercial clients and individual readers.

XML, also known as RSS, is a method of streaming information from a website. Many sites now offer a free XML feed enabling readers to receive headlines from news sites via a desktop software program. XML also avoids problems involved with sending email newsletters, such as junk mail and out-of-date addresses.

Doh!

Posted 16th June 2004 at 6:28 pm

This is The orange XML icon sucks by Simon Willison, posted on 16th June 2004.

View blog reactions

Next: I have some gmail invites

Previous: Embracing Best Practice

22 comments

  1. Informing the user that the currently displayed site has a news feed (whatever format) is something that should be integrated in the browser's UI. Just like there is a button to bookmark an URL on most browser toolbars, there should be one to Add newsfeed (handled by a configurable external news aggregator program, etc).

    BTW: why aren't we all using the feed:// scheme again ?

    Ned Baldessin - 16th June 2004 19:07 - #

  2. If they think XML will save them why no Document Type Definition for the front-page that is supposed to be fed by XML. If I were to see the orange XML icon I would expect raw XML not specifically RSS.

    Robert Wellock - 16th June 2004 19:11 - #

  3. Ordinary people web users also regularly confuse RDF and RSS. Before I started paying attention, I did, too.

    jacob - 16th June 2004 19:37 - #

  4. Informing the user that the currently displayed site has a news feed (whatever format) is something that should be integrated in the browser's UI. Just like there is a button to bookmark an URL on most browser toolbars, there should be one to Add newsfeed (handled by a configurable external news aggregator program, etc).

    There is. At least in Opera 7.5 on XP with the navigation bar turned on.

    Chris Hester - 16th June 2004 20:23 - #

  5. I saw this recently: http://www.bensinclair.com/archives/000129.php If it was smaller I would use it!

    Sam Jones - 16th June 2004 20:44 - #

  6. Wasn't there also a proliferation of little orange buttons that had RSS on them instead? What made everyone use the one with XML written on it?

    Simon Jessey - 16th June 2004 21:03 - #

  7. BTW: why aren't we all using the feed:// scheme again ?

    It was only a suggestion wasn't it? Not officially a standard, unless I missed some news.

    Matthew Wilson - 16th June 2004 21:54 - #

  8. XML, also known as RSS...

    Whoa! Interesting definition of XML. I second Opera 7.50. It's great at displaying news feeds.

    Milan Negovan - 16th June 2004 22:01 - #

  9. Regarding RSS reader evangelism

    Gina - 16th June 2004 22:21 - #

  10. Good question...how hard would it be to put RSS instead of XML? It would still be the little orange box you see everywhere. But I guess since there are 10 competing standards, the best you can hope for is the umbrella concept...?

    Teller - 17th June 2004 00:22 - #

  11. Logicola wrote a post about the XML format, very interesting: Tengo una queja (in spanish; translate to english by Google).

    xoan - 17th June 2004 00:44 - #

  12. Simon, it looks like your link redirect parsing is failing on the link "translate to english...".

    Maybe you've been too liberal on a google domain special case?

    Jeremy Dunck - 17th June 2004 00:58 - #

  13. Oups! Here the correct link, I hope :P

    xoan - 17th June 2004 01:53 - #

  14. If you use the CSS method to display the orange button, you can change three letters and make an "RSS" button. That's what I was planning to do for my sites.

    Michael Moncur - 17th June 2004 10:45 - #

  15. Ordinary people web users also regularly confuse RDF and RSS.

    and, er, what is the difference?

    sfb - 17th June 2004 20:51 - #

  16. RDF == Atom but RSS is itself. I think Atom is a bit better (RSS has a million incompatible versions)

    tom - 18th June 2004 13:30 - #

  17. I agree -- it most defintely misrepresents the file it links to. I've always been bothered, and chosen to name them in text for what they are. On my site I have a 'Syndicate' page, and a link entitled 'XML feeds here' instead of the icon.

    Kevin Francis - 18th June 2004 16:32 - #

  18. RDF == Atom but RSS is itself.

    Atom is not RDF. RSS 1.0 (not 0.9x or 2.0) is RDF. Err, I think.

    Matthew Wilson - 18th June 2004 23:13 - #

  19. RSS 1.0 uses RDF, but only in the same way that regular RSS uses XML. RDF is a way of structuring data which RSS 1.0 was based on. It's all very confusing; I recommend Mark Pilgrim's What is RSS from December 2002 to clarify things - a bit.

    Simon Willison - 19th June 2004 00:08 - #

  20. I made this little xml: rss button because I had a few different xml formats available before.

    Pat - 9th July 2004 20:07 - #

  21. I too used to get mildly irked by the whole RSS!= XML thing, if only because it just gets in the way of trying to describe to people just what XML is. And Mark Pilgrim's article is good, but mostly in clarifying that the whole RSS/RDF/ATOM/syndication world has gone totally stark raving mad.

    For my own uses, I hacked together a quartet of atom icons in a similar style as the orange XML icon (I couldn't figure out the font), which you can find here.

    (Why 4 icons? One pair in standard gtmcknight dimensions, with slightly different formats. One icon in the same dimensions as the ubiquitous orange XML icon. And one final icon that is slightly wider (40px vs. 36px), but looks better.

    Because what we need are more icons ... *rolls eyes*

    LarimdaME - 10th July 2004 08:27 - #

  22. I intend to use the orange XML icon in an application to indicate when a file has well-formed XML in it, vs. all other types of ASCII. If the sanctioned use of this icon is to indicate RSS feed information, I suppose I'm going to toss that convention in the dustbin, and respectfully suggest a "RSS" logo of similar type be created and sanctioned by rss.org or whomever runs the "RSS Advocacy consortium"... whomever it is that propogated the notion that "little orange box with XML on it means RSS Datafeed available"... they need to apologize and fix their mistake. Or maybe the genie's out of the bottle. whatever.

    Ryan Germann - 26th April 2005 19:01 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/06/16/sucks

A django site