The Orange Icon

Good news. Microsoft and Mozilla shake hands: Firefox's orange feed icon [example] will be the standard icon used.

Now for all sites carrying RSS feeds, its time to carry the auto-discovery link. Modern applications would immediately know what to do - e.g. showing The Orange Icon on your behalf, and provide subscription options automatically without you having to spend a full page teaching people how to (and that's assuming readers know wtf is rss for.. ).

Sites that carry feeds without the auto-discovery link might just as well do hyperlinks without actually hyperlinking them, e.g. go to http://www.google.com/ - then they can add a page of instructions teaching people to highlight, copy-and-paste into their location bar, press enter...

Now wouldn't this be better? Firefox gives you a 'Add Live Bookmark' option, what will IE7 bring? What will new applications give? You'll never know what disservice you're doing to your readers.