no one uses them, if they did, search engines would ignore them

Posted Jun 24, 2014 18:26 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: no one uses them, if they did, search engines would ignore them by krake
Parent article: Microformats turn 9 years old

That icon has been widely blamed for the death of RSS. (citations are easy to google, here's the first: http://camendesign.com/blog/rss_is_dying ).

no one uses them, if they did, search engines would ignore them

Posted Jun 25, 2014 6:58 UTC (Wed) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

Well, any UI that is reduced to just an icon is less obvious than a more verbose one, yet we do have them.

They are a trade-off between spacial needs and clarity.

I find the RSS icon useful, I've added many feeds to my reader that way.

But such an icon is just one option, if there are better unobstrusive ways to make the user aware of the additional content then they are obviously also valid and probably preferably choices.

This was just an example that enabling users to access additional content does not require interrupting their present task via a popup.