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MS Reveals Info On New RSS Extensions

Posted by Zonk on from the many-hands-make-light-work dept.

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"

42 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Ah yes... by endtwist · · Score: 2, Insightful

    More proprietary extensions from Microsoft. Now the question is, how useful are they really?

    1. Re:Ah yes... by Prospero's+Grue · · Score: 4, Insightful
      More proprietary extensions from Microsoft.

      It's the Microsoft way...

      Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

      --
      The opinion above is fiction. Any similarity to real opinions, including facts and logic, is purely coincidental.
    2. Re:Ah yes... by peterpi · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Time will tell how useful they are. Hopefully they will be, maybe they won't be. Bravo for the effort by MS though.

      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.

    3. Re:Ah yes... by CaymanIslandCarpedie · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    4. Re:Ah yes... by grcumb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/ reads pretty much like an IETF RFC."

      Okay, it looks like an RFC, but why isn't it an RFC?

      Besides the fact that RSS doesn't appear to have been submitted to the IETF either, of course. Both the MS extension and original RSS spec were released under Creative Commons licenses. So what's the point of releasing a spec without going through the standards process? It depends on the motives of the issuer, doesn't it?

      I personally am strongly opposed to this kind of unilateralism. I'm not a big fan of Dave Winer's approach to things, and I'm even less of a fan of MS'. Having worked on the web almost from the day it was born, I can speak from experience, and MS has been a divisive force from the moment they cottoned on to this Internet thing, almost single-handedly creating the security nightmare we have today by plying half-educated cargo-cult 'developers' with convenience and ease of use that turned out to be easy for anyone to exploit.

      So please, when we look at this issue, let's not forget two things:

      • Specs exist for a reason - peer review, consultation and openness. MS has ensured none of these in this instance.
      • MS has created these pseudo-standards in the past, in effect, dressing itself up in black robes and saying, 'I belong on the Supreme Court too, 'cause I got the robes!'

      The (false?) naivete that the parent espouses does nothing to change my suspicion that this new 'standard' from MS is any different from what came before. MS are relying on just this kind of cursory investigation ('He must be a judge; he's wearing a robe!') to insinuate these extensions into the mainstream.

      I would trust them a lot more if they took the time to actually cooperate with the community, and to follow the well-established processes that exist. They've buckled down and done so in the past, so why can't they do it this time?

      --
      Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
    5. Re:Ah yes... by rspress · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree. Microsoft took a great thing, a standards based internet, and screwed it up so bad it will be years before the damage can be fixed, if at all.

      The worst offender is Active X. Great if you are running Windows and Internet Explorer but bad for the rest of the world. Of course when Microsoft proposed this they were going to give it to the world and provide the tools for all platforms but that never happened. Now we have websites and even embedded devices that will only work on their platform. Of course that was the plan. The only way to own the internet is to make sure it only works with your OS. This has spread to their servers and content creation tools. When now have sites that only work when running windows and internet explorer.

      When sun made a deal with Microsoft for Java it was to be a two way street. Any of the code developed for Java was to be sent to sun and the rest of the world. Microsoft accepted. Until it came time for their code to be opened sent back to sun where it would be open for all.

      With Microsoft you have to wonder what their intentions are. Most often it is to entrench their OS at all costs, despite the gloss their PR department tells the rest of the world. As for not going through the "official" standards channels there is probably a very good reason for that and Microsoft knows that.

  2. Adding to things? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In all honesty I'd be more impressed if I saw them adhering to standards with even half the zeal that they want to "enhance" them.

  3. What kind of attitude is that? by Renegade+Lisp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not very familiar with this topic, and of course Microsoft-bashing is easy in this forum, but still: What kind of attitude is that? Making extensions to a specification and publishing them for everybody else to use? So that's the way standards are defined in the Microsoft universe? I thought "making a standard" meant getting together with everybody else (or at least some approximation of that) and work things out together?

    1. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by rmsousa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, because standards that are developed from the beginning by a commitee are SOOOOO better compared to de facto standards. Now let me resume coding in ADA.

    2. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by fbg111 · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's called the "embrace, extend, extinguish" attitude, Microsoft's standard operating procedure since day 1. No less annoying nowadays, but certainly not surprising. I doubt it will work with RSS, though, since RSS is already in wide use outside the "MS blogosphere", and popular tools like Google Desktop Search and most FOSS RSS aggregators won't incorporate MS's extensions.

      --
      Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
    3. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by rmsousa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe that's why they call them "extensions", not "standards"...

    4. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by PianoComp81 · · Score: 3, Informative

      No where do the links call this a "standard". RSS is a standard. These are add-ons (extensions) to the RSS standard. Now, I have no love for Microsoft, but I'd say we should give them a little credit for releasing their own extensions and licensing them under a Creative Commons License that essentially lets anyone impelment these extensions.

    5. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by EvilMonkeySlayer · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hold on, you're saying that the moon landings actually happened?!
      Ridiculous!

    6. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by Renegade+Lisp · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Maybe I missed something...but, what the hell are you talking about? RSS is already a standard, and Microsoft is publishing an "extension," as they clearly state.

      That is correct, they are calling it an "extension". But still, a "Microsoft Extension Specification" (which is the full term they use on the web site) sounds a whole lot different than a "Microsoft RFC" or a "Microsoft Extension Draft" or a "Microsoft Proposal". As I said in another post, this is very much a matter of style. But look to IBM for an example of a mega-player who's much more developed in its use of correct style in these matters.

    7. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by The+Bungi · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Well, Microsoft works with the W3C, ECMA et. al on a lot of standards. Is that what you were looking for? Or were you just not aware of that?

      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.

    8. Re:What kind of attitude is that? by cyphercell · · Score: 2, Funny

      OMG Bill's moderating

      --
      Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
  4. Proprietary? by rmsousa · · Score: 5, Informative

    RTFA. Specially at the end. The text of the specification is under a Creative Commons license. Also, MS explicitly states that they have no intention of burdening implementations of the standard with patents.

    1. Re:Proprietary? by houghi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Also, MS explicitly states that they have no intention of burdening implementations of the standard with patents.

      I have no intention of getting a hangover ever again in my life. There is a slight difference of not having the intention and not actually doing it.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  5. Embrace and extend will not work as well.. by Ckwop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Embrace and extend will not work as well as Microsoft think. Why? Because it's not the user that decides what feeds are available - it's the webmaster.

    Webmaster's want to maximise the number of people who can productively use their site. Given the choice of Microsoft's custom format or a format submitted to the IETF for an RFC number I know which one I'd rather use.

    Simon.

  6. Licensed Under Creative Commons by ThinkFr33ly · · Score: 5, Informative

    FTFA: Microsoft's copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

    This license is more simple, but the same in principle, to the GPL.

    1. Re:Licensed Under Creative Commons by MooUK · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.)

    2. Re:Licensed Under Creative Commons by MooUK · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!

  7. SSE Licensing information enigma by digitaldc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:SSE Licensing information enigma by marcosdumay · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That means that if they happen to have a patent, they can submarine it. They can wait till everybody start using their extensions and then "disover" a patent and get fees (but constant fees) from people.

      --
      Rethinking email
    2. Re:SSE Licensing information enigma by xenotrout · · Score: 3, Informative
      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.[1]

      Although royalty can mean "payment to the holder of a patent or copyright or resource for the right to use their property"[2], which would prevent Microsoft from charging for patent licenses applicable to their RSS Extensions, it more commonly means "a share of the profit or product reserved by the grantor"[3] or "compensation that is paid to the owner of an asset based on income earned by the asset's user"[4], which essentially limits Microsoft to a flat-fee license. Royalty free doesn't mean that they necissarily will charge for licenses but it seems to mean that they could.

      Although they say the terms will be "reasonable and non-discriminatory", I don't know what that means. I would hope it means that they don't discriminate against Free software, commercial software, competitors, people without money to pay for a license, etc. but it's very vague--perhaps there's a legal meaning or it's just there to sound nice.

      I think the patent trap idea is a bit out there--I don't think it's going to happen--but it doesn't seem that Microsoft is guaranteeing that it won't happen.

      Sources

      [1]http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse/
      Copyright © 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

      [2] WordNet ® 2.0
      Copyright © 2003 Princeton University

      [3] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
      Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
      Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

      [4] Wall Street Words: An A to Z Guide to Investment Terms for Today's Investor by David L. Scott.
      Copyright © 2003 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

    3. Re:SSE Licensing information enigma by killjoe · · Score: 2, Insightful

      RAND licencing basically means open source projects are not able to implement this feature. I don't know of too many open source developers who can afford to pay licensing fees to MS. I suspect that there are patents out there and that MS will price them just above what the open source developers can afford. That way they can be non discriminating and still be a "standard".

      This is why ECMA is a joke. ECMA should not allow patented standards. It's an oxymoron.

      --
      evil is as evil does
  8. Presumptions... by design+by+michael · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Funny, I don't ever recall reading that Microsoft was responsible for the development and evolution of RSS. And now they want to set their own development standards? Seems to me that we had this same problem with HTML circa 1998/9.

    --
    401 - Attention span not found
  9. The great thing about standards ... by surfcow · · Score: 3, Funny

    The great thing about standards in the computer industry is that there are so many to choose from.

    1. Re:The great thing about standards ... by owlstead · · Score: 2

      NO. That should be:

      The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
              Andrew S. Tanenbaum

  10. Answer: moderately by jfengel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Waiting for my head to explode by Black+Art · · Score: 4, Funny

    My brain is having problems with "Microsoft" and "sharing" being in the same sentence without "against" or "forbids" being involved.

    --
    "Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
  12. GeoRSS anyone? by Lord+Satri · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  13. Obviously.. by anethema · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ..This is the second phase in their usual plan of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

    --


    It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
  14. Rss and VB 2005 by bokmann · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And today, this article appears on Developer.com: "RSS: So Simple with Wisual Basic 2005".

    http://www.developer.com/net/vb/article.php/356714 1

    "In no time, you can build a simple RSS viewer that takes a user-entered RSS feed URL and retrieves the title, description, and link for that channel."

    And so now we can expect a rapid proliferation of readers that don't work with every other RSS feed in the world; they will require the 'Microsoft Extensions' (I am assuming this of the VB implementation, either now or in the future). RSS feeds and readers alike will eventually have to implement it one way or the other.

    I don't know what the plan for World Domination here is, but it goes something like this:

    1) Wedge yourself in the middle where no one wants or needs you
    2) ???
    3) Profit!

    1. Re:Rss and VB 2005 by Old+Wolf · · Score: 2, Funny

      And today, this article appears on Developer.com: "RSS: So Simple with Wisual Basic 2005".

      Is that the result of outsourcing VB development to India?

    2. Re:Rss and VB 2005 by dogwelder99 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Did they remember to include security holes to let me embed viruses in an RSS feed? Email is such a drag nowadays.

  15. Why O Why by msuarezalvarez · · Score: 2, Interesting
    • Apart from the verbiage, could they not give a formal schema in XML Schema and/or RelaxNG or at the very least provide XML Schema Datatypes for things like "date" or "number"?
    • Could they not give a formal description of mapping from the general schema to a "simple" subset in which there are no defaults?
    • Do they have to use ad hoc paraphrases like "the name of the property (without any namespace)" instead of the standard XML Namespaces "local part" (or at least be precise in that they want the name of the element, without the prefix , as it could never have the namespace in it because namespaces are URIs)?
    • What does a <cf:group> with a label attribute but no element attribute group by and/or what does it allow one to filter by?
    • Do people at MS not provide references?
    • &c.
    "This specification is designed to be as simple as possible."

    Yup. Great. Sigh.

  16. EEE by Antiocheian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Stage 1: Embrace

  17. Cisco? by horacerumpole · · Score: 2, Informative
    While there are probably many examples of Cisco inventing their own "standard", usually where an industry standard is yet to emerge, but they feature prominantly in many IETF working groups and other open standards commeetis.

    Granted that MS is also mentioned in some of such efforts, but still I think there is a place for Cisco to be offended from such a comparison as you used.

  18. Re:Java by John+Hurliman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And that's why Jscript and J# are the industry standards now? /endsarcasm

  19. In Addition.... by fimion · · Score: 2, Funny

    ... Microsoft has added the ability to define scrollbar colors in RSS!

  20. faux-standards again? by recharged95 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Actually, I'd buy it if other orgs accept it with the additional rule that Microsoft conducts a JCP-like paradigm in extending it further.

    Otherwise, this undos everything, i.e. takes the simple out of RSS