IE 7 to Jump on the RSS Bandwagon — Should You Hop On Too? The User Interface Booby Prize Brian Livingston
The User Interface Booby Prize
RSS, as it stands today, could probably win some kind of prize for having the worst possible user interface.
A blog that offers an RSS feed commonly displays somewhere on its home page a rectangular, orange RSS icon, such as the one shown at left. (This image is only a sample and does nothing if clicked with a mouse.) I almost never see Web sites put any explanation near an RSS icon to let new users know what RSS means or how they would subscribe to a feed.
If you do wind up clicking such an RSS icon but don't have an RSS reader installed, you don't actually get subscribed to an RSS feed. Instead, even at sophisticated technology sites such as Gnomedex.com, you get a browser window full of raw XML, the native language of RSS. (An example is shown at left.)
Raw XML is like raw HTML, except it's even harder to read. The resulting window looks like someone made a mistake and produced a Web page that was supposed to look finished, but actually looks like garbage.
Windows users are supposed to know that they first need to install an RSS reader. Then they're supposed to right-click the RSS icon, then select "Copy Link Location," and finally paste that link into their reader.
That's a ridiculous procedure, which explains the low penetration of RSS into the consciousness of most Web users. But everything could change if IE 7 supports RSS and the new browser becomes common in the huge Windows installed base.
Creating a Positive RSS User Experience
The alpha IE 7 screenshots that Microsoft's developers revealed on June 24 included two new buttons on the browser's main toolbar. As expained by Hachamovitch and Amar Gandhi, a Microsoft group product manager, one button looks like the standard orange RSS rectangle and would appear if a Web page supported one or more RSS feeds. The other button looks like a large plus sign.
Clicking the RSS button would display the RSS content of that page in an attractively formatted "preview" version, not raw XML, the Microsoft developers said. (If a page supported more than one feed, clicking the button could offer a dropdown list to choose from.) Clicking the plus sign would subscribe the user to the feed.
The main competitor to IE, the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser, has supported something like this since November 2004. If a Web site supports an RSS feed, an orange "broadcast" icon appears in the lower-right corner of Firefox's status bar. Clicking the icon allows you to create what Firefox calls a "live bookmark." You can then periodically check these bookmarks, although Firefox is limited as an RSS reader, showing only titles and not descriptions of items, for example. (You can add full RSS functionality with free Firefox extensions like Sage.)
The addition of full RSS support in IE 7 promises to make RSS feeds popular among a much wider audience. Many questions, of course, remain to be answered. Will IE 7 support reading RSS feeds only within an Internet Explorer window? Or will any RSS reader the user installs be recognized as the "default RSS reader"?
This latter question is important because RSS feeds don't currently have a single extension, such as the .pdf extension that marks a file as an AdobeReader PDF. RSS files may be marked as .rss, .xml, .asp, .php, or other extensions, depending on the tool used to create the content.
RSS tool developers have settled on a solution to the problem. They've invented a new protocol known as "feed:". In the same way that "http:" indicates the use of the HyperText Transfer Protocol and "mailto:" indicates the standard Internet e-mail protocol, "feed:" denotes an RSS feed. Downloading IE 7 to a PC could add native support to Windows for this "feed:" protocol. Ideally, any RSS reader the user liked could be the handler of that protocol.
A blog that offers an RSS feed commonly displays somewhere on its home page a rectangular, orange RSS icon, such as the one shown at left. (This image is only a sample and does nothing if clicked with a mouse.) I almost never see Web sites put any explanation near an RSS icon to let new users know what RSS means or how they would subscribe to a feed.
If you do wind up clicking such an RSS icon but don't have an RSS reader installed, you don't actually get subscribed to an RSS feed. Instead, even at sophisticated technology sites such as Gnomedex.com, you get a browser window full of raw XML, the native language of RSS. (An example is shown at left.)