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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."

8 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. plenty of time by CausticPuppy · · Score: 5, Funny

    This feature will be included in Longhorn.

    Don't panic. This gives the OSS community a couple of years to respond. Besides, this feature probably won't make it into the final release of Longhorn anyway.

    --
    -CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
  2. As it should be. by TheBrownShow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

    Which is exactly the way it SHOULD be done. Keep the management of the data seperate from the transmission of the data. Leave content management up to the APPLICATION.

    1. Re:As it should be. by TheBrownShow · · Score: 5, Informative

      A sensible ordering/dating system would make RSS a great deal more powerful, and a great deal more sensible.

      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 :-P

  3. Re:How? by Reverend528 · · Score: 5, Funny

    They're going to add a "Marquee" tag so that rss readers can now support scrolling headnlines.

  4. Re:Microsoft "Breaks" RSS by Utopia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The RSS standard itself allows for extensions.
    The extensions themselves can be standardized.

    Microsoft is not breaking the standard.




  5. Text should be enough for everybody... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. A summary of Slashdot comments: by ArmpitMan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Bye, bye RSS .... by wilsone8 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/06/22# a634

    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