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Microsoft Programming IT Technology

MS Reveals Info On New RSS Extensions 146

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"
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MS Reveals Info On New RSS Extensions

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  • Ah yes... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by endtwist ( 862499 )
    More proprietary extensions from Microsoft. Now the question is, how useful are they really?
    • Very Useful.

      Remember -- Embrace and Extend. Incorporate into your own browser, and nobody elses so everyone breaks accept IE.

      Hopefully, it will fail this time, but.....
    • Re:Ah yes... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Prospero's Grue ( 876407 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @03:55PM (#14196895)
      More proprietary extensions from Microsoft.

      It's the Microsoft way...

      Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

    • Re:Ah yes... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by peterpi ( 585134 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @03:55PM (#14196900)
      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/ [microsoft.com] reads pretty much like an IETF RFC. MS have done some thinking and given their ideas to the public internet. Good for them.

      • Re:Ah yes... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by grcumb ( 781340 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @06:14PM (#14198083) Homepage Journal

        "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 [harvard.edu] 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?

        • "The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."

          - Andrew Tanenbaum
        • Re:Ah yes... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by rspress ( 623984 )
          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
    • Proprietary? (Score:5, Informative)

      by rmsousa ( 614388 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @03:57PM (#14196920) Homepage
      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.
    • by Secrity ( 742221 )
      I would imagine that Microsoft considers them to be very useful in continuing their practice of embracing, extending, and extinguishing industry standards.
    • Re:Ah yes... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CaymanIslandCarpedie ( 868408 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:03PM (#14196981) Journal
      Not so "proprietary". Here is the license it uses: Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 [creativecommons.org].

      Also here [msn.com] 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!

      • It is hard to trust MS after all that they have done. The anology of a wolf in sheep's clothing or the parable of the boy who cried wolf, come to mind when putting trust and Microsoft into the same thought happens. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Trust with verification".

        Deck
        -----------------
        "Half a deck is better than none at all"
    • Answer: moderately (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:12PM (#14197080) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • "Hey! Do the Bender! This move is called the Bender!"[1] [gotfuturama.com]

      This is a forum for freedom of expression, not fascist moves.
  • Adding to things? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @03:54PM (#14196883)
    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.
  • by Renegade Lisp ( 315687 ) * on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @03:54PM (#14196890)
    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?
    • I thought "making a standard" meant getting together with everybody else (or at least some approximation of that) and work things out together?

      That's not the way Microsoft works. That's not the way Cisco works. That's not the way any dominant player in a space would be inclined to work (this principle seems to hold from technology all the way to geopolitics).

      • That doesn't mean that's the way they should work, or that there aren't examples of people out there who are showing that one doesn't necessarily need to be a bully to make money or be successful (eg. Google, open source companies...).
      • yes quite.

        Extend, embrace, divide, conquer

      • Cisco? (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.

    • by rmsousa ( 614388 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:00PM (#14196959) Homepage
      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.
      • 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.

        I don't think Ada is a good example for a poorly designed standard, but that's a different matter. I'm not saying standards should be designed-by-comittee up-front. If a company has the market power to set a de-facto standard, so be it. They should do so by offering products, maybe even whitepapers, but calling it a "standard" from the beginning

        • by rmsousa ( 614388 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:10PM (#14197053) Homepage
          Maybe that's why they call them "extensions", not "standards"...
          • Maybe that's why they call them "extensions", not "standards"...

            That's a valid point, and of course we are talking matters of style here. But if you look at the page, it says: This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers. and then it goes on to list several "Microsoft ... Extensions Specifications". No, they are not calling them "standards", yes, they are publishing them as such. At least that's how it appears to me. Granted, the original developer's documents sound a lot more dow

        • They should do so by offering products, maybe even whitepapers, but calling it a "standard" from the beginning is just the kind of attitude that will ultimately bring such a company down.

          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.

          • 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

            • You were wrong. Just let it go and admit that you were wrong - Microsoft never called this a standard, and what they've done is entirely within their rights. It doesn't "look like a standard", it looks like a specification, and it's one that Microsoft has stated that they are going to follow. Good for them for at least publishing it for the world to see.

              IBM does things entirely the same way, by the way, as does Google, Sun, Apple, and everyone else. That's if they're nice enough to making it unburdened and
              • It doesn't "look like a standard", it looks like a specification, and it's one that Microsoft has stated that they are going to follow. Good for them for at least publishing it for the world to see.

                Beg to differ. "This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers," if you want it in a nutshell. Not just they are going to follow it; they suggest very strongly that this is how things are going to be in the future.

                I don't like this. That's what I said.

                • I don't like this. That's what I said.

                  Yes, well, you ALSO said:

                  They should do so by offering products, maybe even whitepapers, but calling it a "standard" from the beginning is just the kind of attitude that will ultimately bring such a company down.
                  This is what I was questioning.
                  • They should do so by offering products, maybe even whitepapers, but calling it a "standard" from the beginning is just the kind of attitude that will ultimately bring such a company down.

                    This is what I was questioning.

                    I grant you they are not calling it a "standard". That was an inference I made from their way of presenting it. I stand by my suspicion that they expect everybody to follow suit, without them feeling a need to cooperate with other partners within the industry.

                • Beg to differ. "This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers," if you want it in a nutshell. Not just they are going to follow it; they suggest very strongly that this is how things are going to be in the future

                  It's the Microsoft Developer Network. The site is for Microsoft-centric developers. Microsoft can say "English for Developers" and present a specification, just as they can say "Naming Guidelines for Developers". It's just an extension for RSS, like there are dozens of other extensi
      • Are you coding up an IPSec implementation by any chance?
    • It's called the "embrace, extend, extinguish" attitude [wikipedia.org], 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.
    • They are not standards, they are specifications. Any one can cook up a specification and publish it.
    • It is just a common MS practice that MS uses to retain it's monopoly position. For more information concerning Microsoft's practice of embracing, extending, and extinguishing industry standards, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_e xtinguish [wikipedia.org]
    • 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.
    • Can't Microsoft simply support something without bastardizing it? I wonder what content will only be available through a Micro-Pod Cast?
    • 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 tha

    • Woudl you prefer it if they made extensions to the specification and didn't tell anyone else about them?
    • RSS is an open specification. Nothing stops anyone from taking the specs and creating their own to suit their needs.
    • Well, that's how XMLHTTPRequest came about, so there's a place for such things I'd say. We'd be without Gmail and Google Maps and other such things if it weren't for Microsoft's unilateral non-standardness.

      That's not to say it's always (or even usually) a good thing - see ActiveX and the like - but to condemn it outright is silly.
  • Java (Score:1, Insightful)

    Can we learn from the lesson of Java that M$ is not the company that should be setting the standard for anything industry based. They always come out with their own modified version of XYZ and make everybody else play with them.

  • by Ckwop ( 707653 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @03:59PM (#14196937) Homepage
    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 [atompub.org] to the IETF for an RFC number I know which one I'd rather use.

    Simon.
    • That's why there aren't any IE-only sites out there anymore... Sorry to break this to you, but most "webmasters" will either slap something together that works in their browser (IE that is. "Why change something for the minority of users?" they ask) or that some "t00lz" creates for them (Hint: I've yet to see a CMS that produces, better yet, forces W3C valid output). It's a shame, yes, but I don't see why RSS should differ from HTML in that respect :-(
    • Ya but a visual stuio Extension that generates these feeds for websites automatically, will push it into every ASP.net website out there.
    • Umm....

      Since in 5 years, the majority of users who use RSS (like the web-browser, media player, etc.) will be using whatever Microsoft decides to plunk down on their desktop, all they have to do is require a few "proprietary" extensions and methods, and you'll see just how fast webmasters will conform to Microsoft's standards rather than the actual ones.

      I mean, we are talking about the same Microsoft, right?

    • But as any Sysadmin will tell you - it's the users that actually make your website worthwhile. If you don't implement the latest thing they all clamour for, they will seek out new sites that do.
  • by ThinkFr33ly ( 902481 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:00PM (#14196948)
    FTFA: Microsoft's copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

    This license [creativecommons.org] is more simple, but the same in principle, to the GPL.
    • Yes but what about the patents? Are they granting a blanket patent protection? Also what will they do to GPLed product that uses these extensions?
  • by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:00PM (#14196953)
    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/ [microsoft.com] )

    What?
    • 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.
      • They can wait till everybody start using their extensions and then "disover" a patent and get fees (but constant fees) from people.

        What's the "royalty-free" part mean then?
        • License can be royalty-free but also include terms to prohibit use in GPL software... such as no redistribution... they've already done this with some of their "free and open" licenses. (Kind of like Fox's "fair and balanced").
          • Given the fact that they've licensed their own contributions to this code under a GPL-like Creative Commons license [creativecommons.org], them prohibiting the use of any patents involved with such licenses would be bizarre to say the least.
            • Why would be bizaare? They are a corporation and an unethical one that. They could change their minds tomorrow if they wanted to.

              This is the same company that submarined the SPF remember?
              • If they submarined SSE and demanded the destruction of open-source implementations and/or severe licensing conditions, that would be devastating to anyone involved using this standard, and would all but obliterate the standard in question, not to mention any future proposals from Microsoft. The damage to Microsoft's influence on standards would greatly outweigh any damage inflicted on open-source software. It would be like nuking a few blocks of a city to get rid of a gang of bank robbers.
        • by xenotrout ( 680453 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @06:12PM (#14198055) Homepage Journal
          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/ [microsoft.com]
          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.

        • There isn't a royality-free part on the patents, just reasonable and non-discrimatory.
    • Didn't Microsoft previously use RAND licensing as a way to exclude all GPL code?
    • What part did you not understand? It's amazing to me that a single-word comment can get a score of 4.
    • 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.
  • Funny, I don't ever recall reading [harvard.edu] 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.
  • by surfcow ( 169572 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:10PM (#14197061) Homepage
    The great thing about standards in the computer industry is that there are so many to choose from.

  • by Black Art ( 3335 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:16PM (#14197120)
    My brain is having problems with "Microsoft" and "sharing" being in the same sentence without "against" or "forbids" being involved.
  • R is for "really" (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have to wonder about the mentality of someone who looks at the RSS specification and thinks "What Really Simple Syndication needs is to be less simple".
  • GeoRSS anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord Satri ( 609291 ) <alexandreleroux@ ... com minus author> on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:33PM (#14197302) Homepage Journal
    I only quickly browsed MS's site, but I don't think they implemented something similar to georss.org [georss.org].

    From slashgisrs [slashgisrs.org]: 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.
    • The Borg Collective always "proposes" some set of "alternate" standards which they then implement in their own products, attempting to make them the de facto standard by sheer force. This just sounds like more of the same from them.

      2 cents,

      Queen B
  • Okay so lets take a step back and have a look at MS's past wonderful contributions to computing standards .. Standard: HTML Contribution: enough said...
  • Obviously.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by anethema ( 99553 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:49PM (#14197435) Homepage
    ..This is the second phase in their usual plan of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. [wikipedia.org]
  • Rss and VB 2005 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bokmann ( 323771 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @04:58PM (#14197498) Homepage
    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 [developer.com]

    "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!
  • Why O Why (Score:2, Interesting)

    • Apart from the verbiage, could they not give a formal schema in XML Schema [w3.org] and/or RelaxNG [relaxng.org] or at the very least provide XML Schema Datatypes [w3.org] 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 [w3.org] "local part" [w3.org] (or at least be precise in that they want the name of the e
  • EEE (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Antiocheian ( 859870 )
    Stage 1: Embrace
  • RSS was one of the few WWW things that didn't easily allow for an exploit on IE. With these extensions, this much-needed functionality will finally be available to IE users, everywhere!

    Coming Soon to a Win32 box near you... ActiveRSS.NET(SP9)
  • If you want your extensions to common protocols to succeed, I suggest you leave your corporations name out of the protocol name. And also leave out anything that resembles a copyright claim or license agreement. Web professionals are still dealing with the mess you made of HTML, Java and JavaScript.
  • ... Microsoft has added the ability to define scrollbar colors in RSS!
  • by recharged95 ( 782975 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @09:03PM (#14199089) Journal
    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

"The medium is the message." -- Marshall McLuhan

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