Check outside your window, pigs may be flying. For once, I’m actually going to quote a David Coursey column and agree with it.
David Coursey wrote an opinion column this week entitled RSS Is a Label We Don’t Need to See … and he’s right: “It’s no disrespect to the technology to replace the term RSS with something like Web feeds, just a friendlier public face.”
The initialism1 “RSS” should never have been used the way it is, as a headline, a link, a name. The average Internet user doesn’t care about the difference between RSS and ATOM, they just want an update feed that their news program can parse. Of course, I’ll happily go a step further and insist that “the average Internet user” shouldn’t be subjected to any technology acronyms in non-technology content. That is, it’s fine to use technological terms, acronyms and abbreviations in technical articles, but keep them confied to that. My parents certainly don’t need to see “RSS” or “Atom”, nor “HTML” or “PHP” or “ASP” either, not only are they unlikely to understand the difference, they just don’t care.
1. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an initialism is an abbreviation consisting of the first letter or letters of words in a phrase (for example, IRS for Internal Revenue Service), syllables or components of a word (TNT for trinitrotoluene), or a combination of words and syllables (ESP for extrasensory perception) and pronounced by spelling out the letters one by one rather than as a solid word.
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I definitely agree with that, too!
Yes! I’d argue that ever as a programmer, I find all these acronyms get really annoying. RSS by itself tells me nothing if I never heard of the concept, where “Web Feed” for example would’ve already tickled my mind and my interest.
To be quite franc, I have never cared to hear about it until recently. I have so many of these acronyms / short names (java, jsp, j2ee, xslt, css, tld, swt, sql, oodb, struts, etc etc) to toy with it’s just crazy… When I hear some new word come out often in web conversations (forums, etc) I often think oh god another buzzword
I just wait a couple months to see if it sticks around then I’ll give it consideration hehe.
So I’m all for a more user-friendly web. The technology’s awesome, simplicity / readability is a quality too often overlooked.