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Microsoft Proposes RSS Extension
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie said this week that his company is working on a new extension to RSS that would help users with different contact and calendar software and services synchronize each other's information." From the article: "If this sounds familiar to those using IBM's Lotus Notes, it should. SSE was conceived after Microsoft's recently recruited chief technology officer Ray Ozzie brainstormed with members of the Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile and Messenger Communicator product teams shortly after he joined."
"RSS" is not a form of RDF. Only "RSS 1.0" is a form of RDF, and it is, by far, not the commonly-used version. SSE is built on RSS 2.0 which is not RDF at all.
RSS 2.0 supports XML namespaces. This defines such a namespace. RDF is not involved.
You mean the sooper sekrit details posted here under a Creative Commons license, which was linked in TFA?
Listen, I'm not prepared to take everything they say at face value, but this is probably a step in the right direction. We have an instance where they've proposed this extension and published it, for anyone to use.
Now, someone more technical than me will have to review what they've published and comment on what, if anything, it screws up.
Why not join in and support the effort?
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Sounds like Microsoft is trying to re-invent GroupDAV, which is an open standard developed for precisely this purpose. Microsoft just has to be a childish brat and do things its own way.
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Fair enough. I was't aware that RSS 2 isn't RDF based.
But even XML namespaces makes any extension like this pretty much unecessary.
It's a shame that RSS couldn't still be RDF... RDF needs more "killer apps".
Too bad I don't have mod points for you, man, and too bad your comment is buried at the bottom. To all the wankers already going off about MS patenting the specs:
Take a look at the licensing information - get to the source.
Ok, if you really are that lazy, it's a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5, which means you only have to credit MS for this stuff, and release your own stuff (plugin/library?) under the same license.
Please keep in mind that Microsoft invented AJAX, without which things like Google Maps and GMail wouldn't be possible.
Personally, I'm glad Microsoft is proposing a standard extension to RSS, instead of using their own proprietary format or protocol for this sort of thing. If you were trying to make a piece of third-party software interoperate with Exchange or Outlook, wouldn't you be glad too? Instead of trying to reverse-engineer some weird proprietary format, somebody will just extend the RSS libraries already available for your language of choice and you'll be able to use those (I expect XML::RSS::MSExtThingie will show up on CPAN within about 15 minutes of this new standard being published, and you'll be able to compile it into the next version of PHP).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
IANAL, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but: Even if they release the spec under a creative commons license, that doesn't stop them from patenting the ideas expressed in 'said spec, does it?
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