I’ve just discovered a rather annoying change in Safari’s RSS behavior. It lets you pick a feed now - i.e. if a page has multiple feeds, a little drop-down appears.
That, in my book, is a bad idea. I’ll invoke the mythical UI Grandma (”Would your Grandma know what this means?”). It’s simply confusing. People have just gotten used to the idea that the blue button is a news feed. Throwing a choice of format at them is a bad idea. (Especially since it doesn’t really matter. RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 - nobody on the user side cares as long as they get their feed. If this is what brought you here, just pick one of the feeds at random.)
Off to bugreporter we go, Radar #5570712
Boy, I’ve spent a lot of time there since Leopard came out.
I haven’t upgraded yet, but I’d REALLY like that feature even though YAG (Your Average Grandma) would definitely be totally confused.
Atom has the advantage of fewer duplicate feed items (I’m not sure why but it’s something to do with hashing and how a feed won’t show up 2x when all that was changed was its post time or title, etc.). So, I’d love to be able to choose easily.
Maybe they can have it off by default and users can choose to enable later.
how about the use case where the site has multiple feeds? one for articles and one for comments?
Bryan: Wouldn’t it be up to the site designer to handle that properly?
Autumnist: Maybe, but Apple is not fond of configuration options. Most things you can have, or you can’t have - but you can’t switch’em on/off
Well.. my grandma (or my mom for that matter), wouldn’t even dare pressing the blue button. First, it doesn’t look like a button, second, she doesn’t know what RSS is, third, she doesn’t care.