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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"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 great thing about standards in the computer industry is that there are so many to choose from.
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.
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."
"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:
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.
Otherwise, this undos everything, i.e. takes the simple out of RSS