RSS and IE7

I was just browsing around and saw some very, very good news.

Microsoft was looking for an icon to use for their Web browser to indicate that a site has RSS feeds available. They came up with a bunch of their own, posted in their blog about it, asking what the people thought.

The result? People said liked the icon Firefox already used.

It is at this point that things could go only one of two ways:
1: Microsoft does their usual; forging their own path, ignoring everyone else, creating their own symbol
2: Work with people and set up a standard

Oddly enough, this time they went with option two. As they wrote here, they met up with the Mozilla folk and have decided to use the icon Firefox is already using.

Simply awesome.

Standardizing is something that seems like it should be common sense, but has never come easily. There are so many proprietary formats and tangents away from standards that it makes developing more and more challenging. While this has less effect on the actual coding here, it's great to see cooperation among those guiding the way.

So kudos to both Microsoft and Mozilla for improving the user-experience. Stuff like this actually gets me looking forward to IE7, rather than dreading what my Websites might look like under the new rendering (and the thought of learning more hacks to make things look right).