Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Microsoft are bouncing around drafts for new RSS icons. Scoble makes a note of why Microsoft likes icons over text:

We use icons to denote everything. Why not just text? Cause icons work better and we want to localize everything. Windows is available in 26 or so languages and icons translate better than letters like RSS or XML.

I agree completely. This is the exact same reason I generally prefer the iconic road signs you find in Europe over the symbolic US counterparts (there are exeptions). Maybe the Federal Transit Administration should listen to Microsoft — or better yet, hire me. Icons, baby, icons.

One site I have been returning to daily is Widgetopia. It is a “Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities.” It is always interesting to see what kind of widgets Christina and her cronies are digging up. Browse through the archives as well. It's all good and you'll find everything from baby monitoring to stupid placeholders.

To celebrate the joys of user interface design here are three icons I made to de-stress. There are more where they come from (the others are just as bad).

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Note to Internet Explorer users: Internet Explorer does not support cascading stylesheets sufficiently to display generated content such as XFN men. Other browsers from this century do.

On one of the XFN pages it is suggested to insert an asterisk after a link to a person you've met. I don't like the look of an asterisk after a link so on these pages I have a little XFN man after links to people I've met.

I figured that maybe other people would like to use these men as well so I quickly made a handful in different colours. My family of coloured XFN men are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Feel free to modify these for your own website:

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I have also uploaded a photoshop document (7.81 KB) with all five men included if you prefer to get that.

Now I'm considering whether these men are more suited to describe a “friend” than the “met” relation. I would like to hear any opinions.

Update the day after

It seems I totally forgot to include the CSS necessary to display the XFN men. Here we go:

a[rel~="met"]:after { content:url("path/to/image/xfn-met.png"); padding-left:3px; vertical-align:baseline; }

Update April 14th

As you may have noticed I'm using a small heart to designate the “sweetheart” relation. You can also use this for the other romantic relations (crush, date, spouse).

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