Firas Durri: Enthusiast

I try not to get involved in useless arguments—or at least, not cite them here—but it’s bothersome to have your persona dragged into a debate that you’re mainly agnostic about, especially to represent a point of view opposite from yours. And to find that framing of your words indexed in search engines or quoted. Hence a clarification: As far as the orange XML button is concerned, I think that in the end—as with most issues techies lunge at each others’ throats about—people who wish to behave in a certain way will continue to do so and those who wish otherwise won’t. Anyway, here is my series of comments on this matter:

• Scoble says, “Some developers believe it’s confusing when you click on an XML icon and get a bunch of XML code. So they want to put up a pretty HTML page that’ll explain what RSS is. [...] I hate it when webloggers don’t have their syndication feeds as an XML icon.”

  I comment,

  Hey Scoble, whether the feed is available on an XML icon or not has little to do with what’s presented to a web browser once it’s accessed, yeah?

  Plus The XML icon is a vendor-specific GUI component. Not everyone wants orange on their pages. That’s life. (It’s also what autodiscoverability tags are for. Let’s have machines talk to machines and humans talk to humans. The idea of ubiquitous XML buttons and dumping XML on my screen when my browser asks for a feed twists that around.)

  I want you to tell me what the RSS feed is if I somehow load it in my browser. But I don’t want to have to go looking for it anyway.

  Firas • 5/21/04; 3:53:48 AM

• Scoble says, “Of course there’s a chance that I just missed the feed link. I really don’t like sites that don’t use the XML icon.”

  I comment,

  Scoble: why are you so attached to the XML button? Check out Michael Hanscom’s blog: his feeds section practically screams at you to click it. And that orange XML button fits nowhere in his default stylesheet’s colours.

  Orange XML is Radio’s way of doing it. This is their way of making a mailto link:

  

  Are you now going to suggest that everyone use that so that people can find where to email? No, of course not: you just click on about or contact. There is no such thing as a standard web GUI. Thank God.

  Firas • 5/24/04; 12:11:10 AM

• Scoble says, “OK you XML-icon-hating-RSS-feed-subscribing geeks here’s your solution: RSS Explorer.”

  Given that Scoble’s attitude was mellowing and I’d realised that it’s not just Radio Userland which makes feeds available as little orange icons, I casually said that it’s not really hate as much as a desire to not use a bad solution to a problem. Scoble was calling for uniform adoption, and this was the reason for the disagreeing views—I don’t hate your way of doing it; it’s just that it doesn’t work.

  I commented,

  By the way, I think many of those who disagreed with your previous postings on this subject don’t hate the XML icon; it’s rather pretty in its own way. They hate being told to use it.

  Firas • 5/25/04; 2:40:13 AM

Then Raena started her comment with something that was hardly transitional to mine, and I figured that my words were misinterpretable. Only to have it confirmed by the scripting.com link. So, trying to be diplomatic, I elaborated, “Er. I meant that many objectors don’t want to use it if because [sic] it doesn’t suit our purposes, rather than because of some intrinsic hostility towards the concept itself (for example, when used by others.)”

I’m not even sure why I took the time to post this, given the futility of any discussion on the topic, but there it is. There may be more to say, about technology communities breaking from leaders who seek control to the point of abuse and manage to have a rotating set of sensible people mysteriously turned into sycophants. But when someone’s dissing the Guardian, speculating about spidering behaviour from others’ server logs and looking to the Talmud instead of taking reasons at face value, there is little helpful to add.

Update: Well, I was mistaken. There is this to add.