Ever wondered where the orange RSS feed icon you see on all blogs, sites and browsers around the world came from.
It was created by the Mozilla foundation, the guys who made Firefox if you're wondering, they first came up with it for use with the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox. After doing so they proposed having the icon be used universally in connection with feed-enabled applications or online services, blogs, news sites, and in general any web site offering information via open web syndication formats.
There was some disputes a while back when Microsoft tried to create their own version for use in IE7, they can't help themselves can they, which would have been a total disaster as it would have just lead to more confusion in an already confusing world. You can see their versions here. Yeech!
It's a good thing that they decided to use the icon created by Mozilla as it helped propagate a standard for something that universally has become synonymous with feeds. Which would not have been the case if MS went their own separate way.
A quote from Asa Dotzler who is part of the Mozilla group summarizes it
Something as small as a name or icon choice can make a big difference in how approachable a new feature is. I'm encouraged that we're further distancing browsers from the awful "RSS" as a feature name and icon identifyer. We don't call web pages "HTML+CSS+JavaScript Pages" and we don't identify them in the browser using little icons containing "HTML" and "CSS" acronyms; We shouldn't do it for feeds either.
If you have Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator or would like to know where to get more RSS icons images without wading through the internet then visit this the home of the standard web feed icon and download the zipped file. You can also find more links there to read up more.
So now you know where and how that wonderful looking feed icon came into existence. May the feeds be with you 
Technorati Tags: mozilla, rss, feeds, icons, design, firefox
Incoming search terms:
- who created rss icon
Related posts:
Getting Office Furniture for your Business
A much needed feature in digg - Blocking Sites
Diversity in Diggs
Name Your Price Web Hosting
Item Of The Week - March 8th, '08
SEO Book Discontinued! Get Your Copy Before It's Too Late!
Very informative…. I didn’t know that it was created by Mozilla
I didn’t either till I dug it up. Cool huh!
If Microsoft was willing to copy the orange RSS chicklet from Mozilla, why not just do web developers everywhere a favour and adopt the Gecko engine as well?