hultberg.org: LinkLog

That orange thing must be broken...

Good point about the horrifying tech mumbo jumbo still surrounding RSS feeds, and a glimpse of a possible future solution.

XML- and RSS-feeds look scary to people who don't know what they are or what they can use them for. Clicking one of the more and more available little orange XML-icons leads to a page that looks broken. No explanation, no help offered. Either you already know what it is or you get really confused.

One way of making raw RSS-feeds more user friendly would be to offer up an XSL-stylesheet for the browser to apply to the feed when viewed. That stylesheet can give a basic look and feel similar to the rest of the site and also explain what is all about, perhaps provide links to aggregators and such.

An example is provided over at moezzoblue.com:

By styling and providing a reason for this page’s existence, hopefully users will be provided an answer before the question is asked.

Dave, the author, states that it probably only works in Gecko-based browsers, since the rendering of the page has to be done by the browser. It works in Mozilla as well as IE6. If I remember, I will make more tests to see where it breaks exactly.

In the comment-section are more interesting ideas on how to make the RSS-feeds less intimidating when viewed in a browser.

mezzoblue § Plugging the RSS Usability Hole

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