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

Here we go again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, one more thing for Microsoft to muck up. Let's just hope that they don't put any security holes in it...

Microsoft is The Follower

[myrick]

It continually amazes me that Microsoft can get away with following an industry. They have done it from day 1, nearly 25 years ago, in purchasing QDOS. They mooched from IBM and Apple to make Windows. They continually release products that are just copies of someone else's idea (Acryllic, etc.). I mean, it's clearly an excellent way for them to run their business from a financial perspective, because no one can really argue with their profit margins. However, six years between OS and browser releases, incorporating features that people have released long before them is just inexcusable. How long can this be maintained?

My guess is that they have so much legacy code, hardware, etc. to support that they just can't develop at a reasonable pace anymore. Will Windows eventually buckle under its own weight? I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that Longhorn will validate this platform. Unfortunately, their near-monopoly gives them the freedom to be so mediocre. Here's to hoping I'm surprised in 2006.

Why not follow the proper "channels"?

[holiggan]

Excuse me but when someone wants to "improve" a standard, isn't there a well-know, generally acepted method to do it? you know, with peer-reviewing and stuff? It just ticks me when Microsoft wants to "improve" something, but at the same time making it "unilateral", so that only their customer could benefict from the "improvements". If they want to do something that's Windows-only and that it's based in RSS, so do it, but call it something else and cut the associations with RSS! It reminds me of the "protected" CDs from RIAA... technically they aren't CD-DA, so stop calling it "CDs" and start calling it "round things with protected music that only play in selected equipements"...

Here we go again.

[hanshotfirst]

Just like when they 'extended' java?

Note to BillG:

Just because you add features to something beyond a standard, does not make your version the new standard.

Standards, by definition, only exist when ALL interested parties agree to the definition of the standard. (Not to be confused with regulation: where all affected parties are forced to accept a definition of the standard, a la digital TV.)

Microsoft akbar!

[Thud457]

I've heard tell that each of us will have seventy virgins when we reach Longhorn!

Re:Innovation

[tsbiscaro]

Microsoft didn't invent the Internet.

Al Gore did.

Parent is wrong

[DigitlDud]

Microsoft announced today a plan to 'extend the RSS standard to better support the publishing of ordered lists of information...'

Microsoft didn't announce anything. This was leaked by some totally random guy on his blog.

Re:Innovation

[foobar_fred]

Nuh-uh. Al Gore did. (But they did invent the PC, the word processor, and email. I, for one, welcome our new RSS overlords.)