Microsoft is planning to extend the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard to better support the publishing of ordered lists of information, a company spokesperson says.
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.
Didn’t they “extend” HTML back in the day along with Netscape? It only took a couple of years and new sets of standards to fix that fiasco. Why not do it again I suppose is their thinking?
They should follow RDF standard… or try to use Atom.
What, did you expect anything less from the company who invented tabbed browsing? Besides, if they announced it for Longhorn, it has a pretty good chance to get cancelled before launch.
It turns out that Microsoft is going to release its extensions to RSS under the creative common license, and they do have a point – there’s no really good mechanism built into RSS right now for the creation of lists. eg. ‘Top 10 favorite books’, ‘My Wishlist’, or even ‘Most popular del.icio.us pages’.
So, it looks like Microsoft is actually doing this one right, and will help benefit the RSS community. It’s Apple with their iTunes namespace and redundant extensions that’s trying to bully everyone this time.