Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Acronym : The worst thing in worldwide communication...

RSS, RSS/XML, ATOM, Live bookmarks, Web Feeds or Dymamic Bookmarks ?

... My post title should also be : Please, leave the geek guys far away for a new technology definition term. Here is why I wrote that post !
It's start with RSS, XML/RSS, and after Atom ! To confuse your mother more and more, RSS has two meanings; Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. Wow ! Go in a cab and ask your taxi driver to tell you what that mean ?

Now we got two new term to confuse everyone : Live bookmarks and Web Feeds !

The first one is still not so bad because it's use the term "bookmarks" who is now almost a common word for internet users, but in my mind it should be called "dynamic bookmarks". The "feeds" terms doesn't represent a concrete image in my mind.

If the first guy have called the Really Simple Syndication (sic) an "Dynamic Bookmarks", I'm almost sure the more than 9% of the americans know about it !

The same appends all the time with acronyms, when we work with big companies or even worst with government sites. It's full of acronyms who can have a lot of diferents meanings in other state/province of your country and even worst outside it! Thoses acronyms are use in domain names, directories and file names. Don't use them and use two or three words to describe to users the meaning of your URL !

Please stay away from that, if you want to be found on the Web !

Inspired by : Greg, Martin , Bruno and Sylvain

No comments: