Tweak

Tim Bray (of XML and Atom fame) writes about the new found love between MSIE and Firefox (they agree on using the Firefox invented icon for announcing the presence of a feed).

How ironic that Tim actually added this icon to his page now! Because my initial thought on the MS-FF agreement was "this doesn't help people much unless the symbol is universally adopted by page authors as well."

I couldn't agree more on the content of his posting: things need to be even simpler and more integrated. Two nagging details though...

• I'm not sure how we can have a 'default feedreader' on Windows. The 'feed:' pseudo-protocol is a unpopular hack (though it actually works if an app registers this protocol for itself...) and the mime type 'application/rss+xml' doesn't work because it lacks the source URL. The latter problem can be solved in Opera if you care to configure the setting manually and check "Pass web address directly to application", but users of other browsers don't have that luxury. And Opera's really integrated RSS icon in the address field kicks in earlier, preventing you from sending the feed to a different default reader on your system.
• Tim suggest the localizable text 'Subscribe' for the autodiscovered subscription address. This doesn't fit well with our tendency for clean UI...

Scoble has some good points here
<http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/08/08.html#a8059>

I really like to get my information from newsfeeds, because it is fast and simple, with a unified layout. In Opera 7.5 of course. Plain text is enough for keeping me up to date. That's also why I prefer newsgroups, compared to webforums, as a means to communicate with Opera users. For every 40 articles I read, I click one link. And I've also dropped some feeds that only offer headlines. Why subscribe to nu.nl's feeds, if nos-nieuws offers about the same general news stories in Dutch *with* a synopsis:
<http://www.nos.nl/export/nosnieuws-rss.xml>