All those people who are jabbering about the color, shape, and text or lack thereof on the button that identifies an RSS-based Web feed are missing the point. Which is:
What happens when you click that button?
Today, in most browsers, if you click the orange (or blue) XML/RSS/whatever button you get taken to a Web page that is an ugly, stripped-down version of the page you were just reading.
Here, for example, is what you get if you click the orange XML button on Dave Winer’s home page in Firefox:
Not very helpful, is it? It could fairly be described as user-hostile.
If you click the XML link on this page, you get a page that’s much prettier, thanks to the fine work of those wonderful folks at FeedBurner.
But it’s still dauntingly technical. If you’ve set up an account at My Yahoo, NewsGator, Rojo, or Bloglines, it’s easier to figure out what to do, but an RSS newbie will run screaming from either page unless they are determined and not easily intimidated.
In fact, when people click on the orange XML button now, what do they learn? Don’t do that again.
When IE7 ships, it needs to have a really great way of dealing with RSS feeds. If it’s successful in that regard, then people at all technical levels will have a good experience when they click the button, regardless of its color, shape, or text. And they’ll be likely to do it again.
Ed Bott 
You only get xml if your xml does not reference a xslt stylesheet. If there is such thing, and the xslt stylesheet translates the xml into html, then the user sees a regular web page, with an opportunity to be told that it’s something (s)he could subscribe for and so on.
Thus it’s really up to us to make the RSS thing more useable.
I have been saying that for months to Winer and co. No feedback.
And in the C9 demo of IE7, the IE7 feed preview thing is just that.
Hey Ed, how do you make your “torn-out” screenshots? They all seem to be the same size, which makes it hard to imagine doing it manually in Photoshop… Is there some plugin or utility I’m missing?
I’d like to start using that approach, since it’s much more effective at communicating the information than a tiny thumbnail that says “click here for a full size version” and opens in another window…
Chris, I use Snag-it 7 from TechSmith. I use its “capture region” tool to select a block that’s about 400 pixels wide and then use the Edge Effects tool to add the torn edges.
Firefox initially planned to integrate the FeedView extension into 1.5, which would make RSS feeds that did not include a stylesheet display in a much nicer format. Although FeedView will not appear in 1.5, making RSS view more user-friendly still seems to be a priority, as seen by http://wiki.mozilla.org/Feed_Handling:User_Interface
Thanks for that link, Martey.
With respect to Ed’s point – the big issue here is making RSS usable for a mass audience. If you click the orange tab, shouldn’t it be a one click journey through to an RSS reader, or some mixed content that’s there for you to read immediately? If we as publishers (I’m editor of the UK’s National Virtual Museum website) want our readers to embrace the distributed internet, we’ve got make consuming RSS culture so easy a child could do it.
This is, as we see it, the massive gap in provision and a challenge to tech companies and designers everywhere. Give us a browser or reader for RSS that’s really as easy to download, install and use as Real media. Go to it guys and gals!
Jon Pratty, Editor, 24hourmuseum.org.uk
A lot of sites alreay set the href on those icons to “feed://…” which works fine with a lot of feedreaders.
For an example of a formatted RSS XML file, see the one at pcradioshow.org.