The Orange XML Icon
Scoble likes the orange XML icon. The icon is OK for 1999, but I’d like to see all of the little orange icons (and the blue ones, too) disappear within the next five years.
For RSS to be truly mainstream, subscribing to a web page needs to be a simple as printing. When I want to print a web page, I don’t have to go scroll through the page and hunt for a little orange “print me!” icon.
The icon is really useful only for people who already know how it’s used. If you told your mom [1] to ?go to Reuters and subscribe to their page?, do you think she would be able to figure out that she’s supposed to click the orange xml icon? Or do you think she’d do better with a toolbar button/menu item titled ?subscribe?? Now, for people who do understand what the icon is for, do you think it’s more usable to hunt-n-click, or use a single, consistent UI like printing?
In addition, the orange XML icon is not very accessible. A standard toolbar button/menu item would have a standard button name, keyboard accelerators, and so on. Then RSS feeds could be usedin apps which are not web apps but nevertheless provide feeds. For example, when I am looking at a list of bugs in our bug-tracking database, I would like to be able to subscribe to be notified when new bugs matching the criteria are raised. This is easy enough to do today, but it would be nice to have a standard toolbar button that was immediately recognizable. This is especially important for accessibility for people with disabilities. RSS in principle should be extremely useful for people with disabilities, since it strips away the distractions and provides just the content, and automates browsing of multiple sites. However, subscribing to a site is a nightmare for a disabled person. The orange XML icon is a graphic; it can’t even be read with a screen reader! Right-click an icon, highlight a URL, cut-paste into some application, etc. How terrible! How much easier if there were a standard key accelerator, and standard control ID that could be used by screen readers!
I’ve really only heard three good arguments for the little orange icon; listed here with my responses:
- It’s the only thing that works consistently right now. That’s true, and it has certainly served a purpose. But it’s not that consistent. It’s a nice start, but we can do better in 2004. This functionality belongs in IE, and all other web clients. It needs to be as consistent as printing. Opera, Netscape, IE should all use the same button and similar UI for subscribing.
- It lets you put multiple links in the page, if you have multiple feeds available. This is a fine goal, but I’m still not convinced the orange XML icon gives the best usability for this scenario. And this is not just for the accesibility reasons mentioned above. One problem here is that it’s often difficult to tell if the multiple links are for the same feed (in different formats), or for different content feeds. I think that less than 50% of sites which have multiple links actually have separate content. It’s also impossible to tell if the feed linked is a feed for the whole site, or for a specific page. So I think that this ?multiple feeds? is a nice goal, but is broken in most cases. First, I would point out that nobody wants to be forced to choose between multiple feeds for the same content (RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, etc.). It would be much better if the page would show only the feed format that the user’s client was configured to handle. And I personally think it would be better if the ?Subscribe? button simply provided the user with a list of feeds available (using text to describe each feed), and then the user could select (?Subscribe tothe whole site?, ?Subscribe to the ‘Life in the Borg Cube’ Category?, ?Subscribe to comments in this post?).
- It visibly demonstrates the value of XML. Again, I wouldn’t argue with this. RSS is the most successful application of XML ever (in terms of deployed base and developers affected). And the icon is kind of a nice shout-out to XML. But XML is not all that meaningful to your mom, and it’s not really user-friendly to expect normal people to embrace TLAs like XML and RSS (especially when there are better alternatives). And the badge becomes a sort of ?gang colors? used by various factions to promote their own competing formats. To get consistent use of the one true orange XML icon, you have to convince the entire ecosystem of developers to give up their own gang affiliations. But to get the whole world to use a single ?subscribe button?, you just have to convince a couple of browser vendors.
Anyway, I have talked to quite a few people about this since first discussing with Julien, and I have learned that some people really like right-clicking that little icon. So I wouldn’t begrudge site designers who want to use the darned thing (at least for now). And I have no problem is the graphic used on the toolbar button is a little orange XML icon, if people are attached to that graphic. But I really believe that it needs to be standardized at the level of other built-in-commands like ‘print’. Also note that I am talking about standardizing the UI, *not* about standardizing theaggregator client. When you print a web page, you can print to whichever printers are registered on your system. The same should be true of subscribing in an aggregator. And a final note, this is really easy to implement.
[1] When we use our mothers or grandmothersas usability test cases, it’s not out of a notion that our mothers (or women in general) are not computer-savvy. It’s simply because we have higher standards for our mothers than for ourselves when it comes to computer usability — geeks regularly tolerate all sorts of ridiculously unusable stuff that we would never expect our mothers to use (can you say ?Linux on the desktop??).