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."

Comments

Re:How?

[saintp]

Special features to interact with Exchange and/or Outlook.

By keeping track of what's being fed

[kwilliamyoungatl]

You can add DRM and other "features". Uggh.

Re:As it should be.

[DaHat]

To quote one member of the team: "RSS is too good to just be in browsers and news aggregators" and he is exactly right. Why have multiple applications reinventing the wheel to do the same thing when different applications can do their own thing with the data, but leave many aspects of it up to the main system.

Re:How?

[TwistedSpring]

Since RSS is an XML-based standard, it would be relatively simple to add new functionality to it without breaking existing implementations.

Maybe if they froze Longhorn's feature set

[Deagol]

they'd get the damned thing released.

How many features were promised then dropped in Win2003 and Longhorn to get them released? Why the hell do they keep adding features?

At this rate we'll get Longhorn Lite in 2006, Longhorn Complete in 2007, and Longhorn As It Was Really Promised Ten Years Ago in 2012.

MS just needs to get over themselves and get a product out the door with the *current* set of features they promised.

Re:Maybe if they froze Longhorn's feature set

[hacker]

"At this rate we'll get Longhorn Lite in 2006, Longhorn Complete in 2007, and Longhorn As It Was Really Promised Ten Years Ago in 2012.

MS just needs to get over themselves and get a product out the door with the *current* set of features they promised."

Have you ever considered that this might just be a marketing ruse by Microsoft to get their competitors (Apple, the OSS community, etc.) to slow down on focusing their efforts, because "..well, we have a couple of years before Longhorn is released, whats the rush?"

Seriously, what if they released Longhorn in December of this year, with all of the features they've previously claimed were pulled from it? (WinFS, podcasting, IE7, etc.)

This is a very VERY common marketing move, and I'm surprised nobody has seen through it yet. You publically announce that your product is being delayed, so your competitors relax a bit, then you announce some key feature of your product was dropped, etc. and your competition smirks and goes out and celebrates... and then you release the full product, WITH the "dropped" features on Monday.

Your competition crumbles and cries in the corner.

Re:Maybe if they froze Longhorn's feature set

[Doros]

That doesn't make sense to me at all. Are they secretly letting their stockholders know that their next product isn't going to just be a new UI? How about all the 3rd-party software companies that need APIs before the release? Also, many of the features they originally promised are now available in alternative OSes. I also can't think of an example where a software company (or any other company) used this move.

Re:What will they really do?

[cei]

Looks like the RSS 2.0 spec is under Share Alike, actually. Ya learn something new every day...

Goodbye RSS

[Szaman2]

First they will extend it, patent it then they will make sure that IE and Office throw security warning when viewing non extended RSS. Since they have the market share they can pull it off and make it seem that standard RSS is somehow broken.

Then, you can either roll a feed that will apear to be broken in IE, Outlook et all or you will have to pay Microsoft a licensing fee / sign your soul away into shared code slavery...

That is of course if we let them... There is a small chance that RSS is already to popular for them to pull it off. MS would need all the major news providers to jump on the bandwagon with this really fast...

How about "may not break the standard"?

[jfengel]

Let's say "may not break the standard". There are approved, compatible ways to extend it, but it's really hard to design extensibility into a standard. Often extensions are unforseen and won't fit into the way you expected to extend it.

Not to mention Microsoft's history (with Java and HTML) of making extensions designed to lock you in. They succeeded with HTML; they failed with Java (though perhaps that's more Sun's fault than Microsoft's).

Of course, if they have good ideas (and they have an awful lot of smart people working for them) the improvements will be propagated into the standard, and then all of the other RSS readers will want to implement them, too.

Re:Bye, bye RSS ....

[Lagged2Death]

This of course begs the question as to whether MS's extensions will in fact be useful.

RSS was intended to collect news. Now MS is planning to make it show updates to ordered lists - something it was never intended to do in the first place. Is that really such a great idea? Is it likely to lead to a widely-compatible, stable and well-designed system?

Wouldn't it be simpler to keep the frequently-updated list on a plain old web site, and put linked update notices in the RSS feed? What problem are we trying to solve here?

Too Late?

[razmaspaz]

Is this too late? I mean blogger is already the place to do blogging for 90% of all blogs out there. RSS is already very well defined and there are literally hundreds of apps that spit out RSS. Will microsoft's enhancements be doomed to second place? I would think even the most agressive "embrace and extend" campaign would fail here. Of course you can't fault them for trying!

Re:A summary of Slashdot comments:

[Baricom]

I don't believe it is. Their disclaimer is that if they find any patents infringed, "Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification."

Every instance of "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms", such as those of the Office XML formats, has made it impossible to use in GPL software in the past.

Now, if their patent license for these RSS extensions doesn't do that, then I'll be impressed.

Opera's RSS...

[hkmwbz]

Opera had RSS in a 7.5 beta in April 2004. 7.5 final with RSS was released in May 2004.

Re:Bye, bye RSS ....

[Alsee]

I'll tell you what, how about we come back to this issue in about 9 to 18 months and we can discuss whether or not Microsoft PATENTED this extention to RSS?

And yes, I know the bottom of their page promises to "offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent". Care to wager whether it would be essentially the same DELIBERATLY SABOTAGED license that Microsoft slapped on their SenderID system? You know, the royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions that just so happens to PROHIBIT use by GPL and most other open source software? The license that conflicts with the GPL in at least three ways that I counted? And I'm not even a lawyer... so I'd expect there are probably even more conflicts in there that I didn't spot.

Of course I could be wrong. It's certainly possible that this won't appear amongst the SEVERAL THOUSAND software patents that Microsoft is now filing each year. Or if they do patent it, it's certainly possible that Microsoft will come up with and use some BRAND NEW patent license that doesn't conflict with the GPL and other open source projects. And it's certainly possible that we'll finally find those WMD's in Iraq. And it's certainly possible that SCO will suddenly reveal those millions of lines of stolen SystemV code.

Yep, it's perfectly possible that you're right and it's just a bunch of whiney uneducated Slashdot minions unfairly bitching against Microsoft without cause.

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