Subscribe

Is the end of the white-on-orange XML icon near? According to a post from Dave Winer, we may be seeing more white-on-orange SUBSCRIBE buttons soon. This is a good thing. Using the XML button to point to both RSS and OPML files is confusing to non-technical users. It’s equally bad that on some sites users are presented with multiple icons (RSS and Atom) that have the exact same function. The SUBSCRIBE icon tells the user exactly what the it’s for and is format-neutral. I think that the new icon ought to point to feeds using the feed URI scheme. This will make subscribing even more user-friendly be eliminating the need to copy and paste URLs from one app to another.