Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Microsoft decision to ship Longhorn with RSS draws applause

June 24, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft decision to ship Longhorn with RSS draws applause

TAGS: None

Microsoft announced its intention to fully support the RSS Web publishing standard in its next generation version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, along with plans to help application developers more easily create RSS-enabled applications for Windows.

The RSS initiative captured the interest of many who see new opportunities in bringing RSS capabilities to Microsoft's Longhorn OS, especially since Microsoft is not threatening to take over the technology.

Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS, wrote favorably of the news. "This is not the world of 1995, nor is it the Microsoft of 1995," he wrote. "We have drifted apart, gone our own ways. What you'll hear to-day is that they want to come back, and they're largely willing to accept our terms, the Internet's terms, the no-platform-vendor terms. That's what I'll be listening for."

Microsoft apparently wants to help create commercial opportunities for other application developers.

"When Microsoft would talk about embracing and extending a technology, many would interpret that as engulfing and devouring. In this case, they seem to be really going out of their way to talk about extending but not co-opting this technology," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president and research director at Jupiter Research. "The fact they are releasing this under the Creative Commons License, the same license that RSS is released under, is a pretty big deal in and of itself."

"Today, RSS is still mostly an extremely handy way to get blogs, news items, Podcasts, and other chunks of information delivered to you. But the technology has the potential to be a powerful, universal means of automated communication between applications (both Web- and desktop-based) of all sorts," Harry McCracken, PC World's Editor In Chief, wrote. "This news from Microsoft could help make that happen. And it'll be interesting to see if the company's use of Creative Commons licensing spurs other developers to adopt Simple List Extensions."

The company is proposing its own Simple List extensions to RSS that will better allow the technology to support ordered lists of information, according to a report from InfoWorld's Ed Scannell. Presently, RSS feeds are sent and re-ceived as streams of messages with their order being determined only by the time they were sent. Microsoft's extensions are reportedly offering a way to add ordering information so RSS feeds can more intelligently handle, for instance, a Web site's list of best-selling items.

"The RSS [Simple List] extensions we are developing can allow a content pub-lisher to enable a Web site to publish feeds that represent ordered lists of items. We will make these extensions widely available to developers through the Creative Commons [license]," said Megan Kidd, a group product manager on the Windows team.

Microsoft has already done some "baseline work at the platform level" that supports a range of basic functions that are contained in all applications that support RSS, which should help lighten their overall development effort.

"RSS feeds now come through Weblogs but it will go way beyond that. For in-stance, if you are at a conference and go to that Web site, subscribe to a feed that has all the conference information, you can have an RSS feed right into your calendar application like Outlook that will automatically update you on all changes being made at the conference like keynotes and sessions," Kidd said.

Asked about Microsoft's plans to incorporate RSS support into its upcoming Office 12 suite of desktop applications, Kidd said, "you can expect to see some functionality with Outlook," but that the company has yet to formulate any specific plans.

Microsoft will also make it easier for users to discover feeds within their browsers by illuminating icons that allow them to easily see what RSS feeds are available to them at any given moment. The company will also allow users to view the feed live from within the browser, which Kidd said is not available today.

"They will be able to actually see the feed, pick the one they want to subscribe to. We want to make it a one click experience," Kidd said.

Posted by Jack McCarthy on June 24, 2005 04:59 PM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: