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MS Reveals Info On New RSS Extensions
dizzy_p writes "Microsoft released yesterday more information on their earlier announced extensions to the RSS format(s). The specifications can be found on MSDN. The question is, will the mainstream developer adopt these specifications, or will they only live in the Microsoft "Blogosphere" (To quote MSDN). The specifications in question are named Microsoft Simple Sharing Extensions Specification and Microsoft Simple List Extensions Specification"
It is sad that all the good things still have to be made by corporation and the community is still unable to create something useful (like a working RSS-spec) on its own. But I guess the matter is too complicated for hobbyists to solve the problems.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/ reads pretty much like an IETF RFC. MS have done some thinking and given their ideas to the public internet. Good for them.
As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification's extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, 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. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/ )
What?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Not so "proprietary". Here is the license it uses: Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.
Also here is a blog post by its creator if you want to read more about and what it is meant to accomplish without digging through the spec.
Not bad!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
The Simple Sharing Extension sounds pretty useful. It defines extra fields to help make one feed dependent on another feed, which will be useful when you're creating RSS aggregators.
The List Extension sounds less useful to me; it basically sets up fields to define ways to sort and group RSS feeds (like you can do with a SQL query). This one strikes me as less well thought-out and partially redundant with an RSS reader which could sort on any field. That's especially true for your basic blog-like RSS feed, where the set of fields in use is limited. It looks like this is a piece of a much larger generalized query mechanism using RDF.
I'm not an RSS expert so I can't say how necessary these extensions are. But I'll remind everybody that most new standards come out as somebody initially saying, "Here, try this!" and the ones that like stick and are eventually blessed by a standards committee. HTML predates the W3C, and HTML got a good bit of bashing around trying to find the Right Thing in practice rather than having a standards committee guess what was right.
So I'd recommend that people developing RSS readers consider adding these features and see if their users like them.
I only quickly browsed MS's site, but I don't think they implemented something similar to georss.org.
From slashgisrs: A team is working on Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds. From the overview: "GeoRSS is simple proposal for RSS feeds to also be described by location or Geotagged. We standardize the way in which "where" is encoded with enough simplicity and descriptive power to satisfy most needs to describe the location of Web content. [...] it should serve as an easy-to-use geotagging language that is brief and simple with useful defaults but extensible and upwardly-compatible with more sophisticated formats like the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) GML (Geography Markup Language)".
GeoRSS is really an interesting innovation from the actual concept of RSS.
Animoog.org
And BTW, I'll take a standard developed by a governing body or company any day over a hacked-together "standard" like RSS or yENC or any of those others developed by people in their basement. While they are often "good enough", they tend to be underdocumented, hard to extend/adapt and are the source of wide-ranging pointless flamewars on teh interwebs. More often than not they are a worse mess than the one they're trying to "standardize". Ditto languages that evolve without formal specs.
Yup. Great. Sigh.
Attribution, I believe, is enough to make it GPL-incompatible, or at least debateabley iffy.
(I don't believe "debateabley" is a word. If someone has a better way to phrase it, please feel free to suggest it.)
That license requires copyright to be intact for the originals on derivatives. The GPL doesn't - the deriver has to put a copyright notice on but it can be theirs.
IANAL and so forth, nor am I a FSF authority. I just spout off whatever nonsense seems to make vague sense in my head!