Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

I am breaking radio silence here to throw out a link for a site I just found. FeedIcons.com is promoting the new standard icon for feeds.

A few weeks ago, the Microsoft RSS team made a fairly big announcement that they were adopting the Firefox RSS (or Live Bookmark) icon as their icon for notifying the user that a website has feeds available. The icon will be used in the forthcoming Internet Explorer as well as other Microsoft products that will make use of RSS (Outlook anyone?).

So Matt Brett has taken up the cause and created a downloadable package containing EPS and PSD versions of the icon for people to use on their site now to help with the adoption rate of this icon as the new feed icon.

The only problem I see is that people are encouraged to change the color of it. That doesn’t really make it a set standard. If someone were to change the color from orange to match their site, the icon would not stand out as much, nor would it be a universal icon. Sure, the symbol would stay constant, but that doesn’t really help matters. It’s like allowing cities and towns to change the color of the standard stop sign because bright red doesn’t match the scenery.

Let us also not forget that Opera and Safari are still using their own icons for RSS notification. So I would say good job on the site and the downloadable package, but let’s not start changing the color of the icon and dilute the standard before it even becomes one.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 26th, 2005 at December 26,2005 @ 12:00 pm and is filed under Blogging, Blogs, Browsers, RSS, Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.