RSS feeds: keep them well hidden

Mark Pilgrim on extreme minimalism:

Last week, I was talking with Joe about how certain things have made the leap from content to chrome. (”Chrome” is what Mozilla developers call the browser interface around the content pane — the tabs and menus and location bar and so on.) It used to be that you could only find feeds by looking for special icons within web pages themselves. Now all modern browsers support feed autodiscovery tags, and they expose the feeds in menus and icons within the chrome area of the browser. So you don’t need to litter your pages with feed icons; feed autodiscovery allowed them to make the jump from content to chrome.

Nobody should ever have to see a link to your site’s main RSS feed, still less click on it. They certainly shouldn’t have to be shown a link to that feed, on the same page as the feed’s HTML equivalent. All major modern browsers highlight implicit, header-embedded RSS feeds for you, in their chrome. If a given site visitor is the sort of person to use RSS, they’ll see that icon, and won’t need yours however much it looks like a Diesel Sweeties T-shirt.

Arguably, print links are also pointless page-junk, and should be disposed of long before the next/previous links that Mark stridently goes on to condemn. However, web users have been let down so often by site production, and are still suspicious that the page will be created without media-specific CSS, and even with format-polluting tables. The print-page browser buttons currently don’t even warn you if there’s no stylesheet for print media, or if page layout is predominantly tabular, so there’s no user trust in the browser’s native print methods. This is where Jakob Nielsen might step in front of Edward Tufte, as Aristotle discusses in the comments on Joe Tomyako’s blog. In comparison, the RSS icon in the browser’s chrome is an indication to the site visitor that the pages they’re dealing with were put together with a little more care than the average, and can therefore be trusted with implicit-only RSS links.

I have to confess that this Wordpress theme isn’t perfect in that respect: the header-embedded tag on archive pages links to the main RSS feed only, and so to compensate there are RSS links in the navigation to the right. If I had time I would find a better theme, or possibly build my own: if I had time, and if I were more like Mark Pilgrim.