Splat | WiseTome.com

In the last post on feeds (Feeds - RSS), we discussed about the brief history and the use of Feeds. This post, we will look into the little (and sometimes rather large), feed icons themselves.

As the Feed technology caught on, people started using different icons to provide the link to these Feed files. And apart from the RSS feeds (discussed in the previous post), there were other feed formats like the Atom format, and that caused a lot of confusion.

To counter this, the Mozzilla Foundation, around the end of 2005, proposed the common feed icons for RSS and Atom feeds, and the guidelines for its usage was published by the mid of 2006.

After this, the feed icon was soon set as a standard, and that cleared most of the confusion around the Feeds. When ever visitors found this little orange icon on a website, they had a choice of subscribing to the updates of that websites and hence they could know about the updates through their Feed Readers itself.

The usage guidelines allows webmasters/web-designers to even use it at various sizes and also different colors. Hence, if the particular orange icon did not suit for a particular design (for example, in the case where the background color is orange), then you could use different colors for it. The guidelines basically asks the designers to keep the shape and orientation same as the one they have provided and they are free to modify the color and size.

This would keep the icon in the standardized format, and avoid future confusions when if a group of websites start using different shapes for the same purpose.

Next, we will look at the different types of Feed Readers that will let the visitors keep themselves in tune with the updates of the websites that provide Feeds.

Source: Feed Icons