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Microsoft To Extend RSS
Joshua53077 writes "Microsoft announced today a plan to 'extend the RSS standard to better support the publishing of ordered lists of information...' This feature will be included in Longhorn. It appears as though they will be including RSS support in Internet Explorer, which will come over a year and a half after the same technology was introduced in Apple's Safari RSS." From the article: "Gary Schare, director of strategic product management in the Windows division of Microsoft, says that while RSS is a reliable standard for updating information in message form, it currently has no logical way to organize that information in a way that could help subscribers keep track of what is being fed to them."
Their extensions will be released under the Creative Commons License, how about you get some facts before you gripe.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Surely sorting the data is the job of the client program, RSS is just a way of delivering the information. I'd assume the Participatory Culture Foundation is going to have some way of sorting through the shows you subscribe to. Ways which currently exist include indexing the RSS message "Spotlight" or Longhorn search style or just using the existing HTML Meta Tag systems. (The former being IMO much more flexible and informative than anything Microsoft could come up with in code.)
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=8053 3
Amazingly good discussion and demos!
A speech...
Actually Longhorn already has an RSS reader, and Microsoft has been building RSS into a lot of their beta software recently. It's not really much of a surprise at this point.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
No, Safari's had it since 2004-07-28 from which the Firefox team may have gotten the idea in the first place.
But, if we want to include prereleases: some could use Firefox's RSS on 2004-06-15, as there was a publicly-published patch (see bug 244078)(note: not linkied because mozilla's bugzilla doesn't like slashdot referrals.
I'm getting my facts from an interview video on Channel 9 where they sit down and talk with the team who built this system, as well as a demonstration of the system.
You are right though, the Creative Commons is not a software license, it is a license for documents, including specifications. The original RSS specs were published under the CC, and in keeping in line with that because of their talks with the original developers of RSS.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
A sensible ordering/dating system would make RSS a great deal more powerful, and a great deal more sensible.
:-P
There already IS a dating sytem in RSS, see the optional channel elements "pubDate" and "lastBuildDate" in the RSS 2.0 Spec at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
Oh god. This was rated 5?
Now that's not very nice at all, at least I did my homework
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how2
"5 Things You Didn't Know You Could Track with RSS
Package deliveries
New to RSS? Get a free account with Web-based RSS reader Bloglines (bloglines.com). In addition to tracking headlines from your favorite sites, you can now receive an RSS feed on packages from UPS, FedEx or the USPS-just enter the tracking number, and the feed will update at each stage of the delivery.
Library books
Avoid late fees and fruitless trips to the library with ELF (libraryelf.com), which generates a feed to inform you when books you've requested are available at your local branch (including a link to operating hours) and when your checked-out books are almost due.
Local weather
RSSWeather (rssweather.com) sends updates on current and forecasted weather conditions for your city. You can even customize the feed to notify you only when certain changes occur (temperature, forecast, etc.).
TV listings
Need to know when you can next catch Deadwood on HBO? Bootleg RSS (ktyp.com/rss/tv) provides channel-specific feeds (by time zone) with the day's programming for dozens of cable networks, including CNN, the Discovery Channel and ESPN.
Yourself
Find out when your company, favorite sports team or even your name is mentioned just about anywhere on the Web with PubSub (pubsub.com). The site trawls more than nine million news and blog sites and lets you create an RSS feed that alerts you when your specified keywords appear.
It is not unusual in most mature industries for the large companies to sit back and let others do all the hard work and R&D. IBM and Computer Associates frequently buy smaller and more innovative companies.
In the oil and gas industry the large multi-nationals often sit back and let the 'wild catters' take the exploration risk, only buying those that have a good record of finds. Chrysler bought Jeep which was a strong brand and filled a hole in their portfolio. GM was built from zero on nothing but smaller companies (e.g. Pontiac, Buick, Chevrolet) after it became apparent cars were a thing of the future and the companies purchased had staying power.
This is how risk averse accountants operate. It is a very old business pattern.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Dave made a post earlier today here
Group 1: MORE LIKE EMBRACE AND BSOD AM I RITE?
Group 2: RSS is XML and therefore works using magic! It's not like there were eight thousand different conflicting RSS standards before!
A Vanishingly Small Number Of Voices Of Fucking Reason: You know, they released the spec for extensions under a ShareAlike Creative Commons license. They might as well have done it under the god-damned GPL. This is PROGRESS, you imbeciles.
It's not embrace and extend when the guy that created the RSS standard (Dave Winer), has a post up today about how Microsoft specifically asked him if it would be ok to extend the spec before going down this path and how he thought this would be a good addition to the RSS spec.
# a634
http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/06/22
From the article: "The story begins in March of this year. I got a call from Robert Scoble saying there was a group on the MSIE team that wants to extend RSS to handle lists. I was immediately supportive of this, I told Scoble that some people think I'm conservative about extending RSS, but I'm actually liberal. The only thing I don't like is when people invent new ways of expressing data that RSS already defines. He assured me this isn't what was going on."
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. - B.F. Skinner
The w3c and other bodies were Created to standardise the web (standardise as in make equally accessible , not as in the more scary all the same connotations). .
,Submit change to W3C , wait , include it in browser anyway , See browser take over market due to windows dominance and its default inclusion and peoples lack of knowledge of alternates, try to force the W3Cs hand into accepting the standard. .
Every other thing must go by them for peer review and inclusion into our standards system for the world wide web. Frequently MS has just said yah-boo sucks to the whole idea and implemented many many changes to the standards (many time totally proprietary changes) for inclusion in their systems
Which is all well and good if you a small company (at least smaller than total market dominance) , if your small your browser can become a test bed for ideas, unfortunately the case with MS is that MSIE has become a defecato standard by nature of their monopoly so their changes have become dominant throughout the internet.
This causes a whole host of problems for web developers and browser makers , even the average person who uses an alternate system. It was a case of use MSs way or don't browse.
Lately this is greatly alleviated due to more common acceptance of the standards( IE: more people in the know have got to positions of influence)
But still , I'm sure many people have come across sites which refuse to act well on all browsers
Now its dammed hard to get things to work the way you want them on all the browsers because of this (again this is far less of a problem now but still an issue)
What as i understand it MS do is this
They may have a great extension , but the way they do it is totally unacceptable
The internet can never be a democracy for the standards , but the w3c is comprised of members from through out the industry (including MS) and its the best we have to ensure fairness and equality.
Many folks have a few problems with some of the ways the w3c operate (I myself have a problem with their documentation and write ups of the standards.) but it sure beats having a way forced down my throat by a convicted abusive monopoly
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
ok, guess I just learned to make sure I have *text* selected...
_ to_take_rss_five_steps_backwards/#comment1361
/. so I don't expect the 'regulars' to even notice.
here it is as I actually typed it:
Jeremy Wright just posted a comment over at
http://www.digital-web.com/news/2005/06/microsoft
and pointed out the fact that the stuff MS is doing it actually fairly syndication agnostic. (Read: 'not just rss') They HAD to extend RSS to get the functionality they wanted that already exists the ATOM spec.
So if you are worried that they will some how *screw you* if you try to use their extensions, just use ATOM and the functionality is already there.
BTW I think the fact that their extension is being released under the same CC license as the RSS2.0 spec should earn them a little credit, but then again this is
Here is the CC info that bother the original RSS2.0 spec and the MS extensions have been released under:
"Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
Jorgie