Microsoft Loves RSS

The blo­gosh­pere is buzzing about Microsoft’s announced sup­port for RSS. Here’s a quick his­tory of how they got there, and the good and bad on what they are adding to the standard.

How we got there?

Microsoft is not really a new player in the syn­di­ca­tion space. With the release of Inter­net Explorer 4.0, in 1997, the Red­mond giant intro­duced CDF, a for­mat to push con­tent and soft­ware to the oper­at­ing sys­tem. With the craze around push deflat­ing, CDF was pushed in the background.

While such efforts were not that suc­cess­ful, RSS moved stealth­ily towards the main­stream. As a plucky lit­tle stan­dard, it is start­ing to dom­i­nate how a lot of noti­fi­ca­tion is being done. So Microsoft decided, wisely, to join the RSS bandwagon.

How­ever, old habits die hard and just embrac­ing a stan­dard is not enough. So Microsoft decided to extend the stan­dard with some “enhance­ments” they cre­ated (known as Sim­ple List Exten­sions). The fact that they are extend­ing the stan­dard is not some­thing I have a prob­lem with, even though it sounds like the old “embrace and extend” approach they took to HTML. How­ever, what I have a prob­lem with is what they decided to tackle.

Lists and RSS

The new pro­posed spec­i­fi­ca­tion allows the abil­ity to cre­ate lists. Yes, lists are a good idea if you want to use RSS for some­thing other than dis­trib­ut­ing con­tent. How­ever, it’s a prob­lem that’s already been solved, and one that has pained much of the RSS com­mu­nity. Let me explain.

In early 2000, when RSS was still in its infancy (ver­sion 0.92), a debate erupted on sev­eral mail­ing lists as to how RSS should evolve. The two sides to the debate were as follows:

• On one side were the hard core geeks, who believed that RSS should be refor­mu­lated as an RDF spec­i­fi­ca­tion, tying it into the Seman­tic Web. Real­ize that, at the time, the con­cepts behind this were faily rev­o­lu­tion­ary: machine intel­li­gence, etc…
• On the other side were the hard core hack­ers, who believed that the beauty of RSS would lie in its sim­plic­ity, and that its adop­tion would go along the same course as HTML if it were kept simple.

This ended up with two dif­fer­ent for­mats: RSS 1.0 (which met the require­ment of RDF inte­gra­tion) and RSS 2.0 (which met the require­ment of simplicity).

Well, the irony is that it turned out both sides were cor­rect: On the one hand, plug­ging RSS into a more for­mal struc­ture, using things like name­spaces and an orderly model could allow it to do more; on the other hand, keep­ing it sim­ple allowed it to thrive.

Fast for­ward to today. RSS 2.0 is widely adopted, thanks to its sim­plic­ity. And Microsoft is announc­ing the use of exten­sions to cre­ate lists. RSS 1.0 also enjoys wide sup­port (though nowhere near as wide as RSS 2.0) and sup­ports lists natively. See the humor here: by endors­ing RSS 2.0 and cre­at­ing extra exten­sions, Microsoft has essen­tially added a fea­ture that existed in RSS 1.0.

But wait! It gets bet­ter. The pro­po­nent for the RSS 2.0 spec­i­fi­ca­tion was Dave Winer, who wrote the RSS 2.0 spec­i­fi­ca­tions and main­tained it for a fair amount of time after that. How­ever, Dave is push­ing a new list and out­line for­mat called OPML and is push­ing it as the next for­mat he wants peo­ple to try out.

So we now have three dif­fer­ent ways to cre­ate lists. And that’s not even con­sid­er­ing the fact that you could use the Micro­for­mat con­cept and had a rel="list" to an HTML ele­ment and end up with another format.So Microsoft gets an A for embrac­ing RSS, another A for using name­spaces (instead of cre­at­ing a new ver­sion of RSS) and releas­ing their exten­sion under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, but gets an F for poor research in terms of intro­duc­ing a new for­mat. There were a num­ber of other use­ful things they could have intro­duced as part of this effort but just gen­er­at­ing lists is attempt­ing to rein­vent the wheel with­out really pro­vid­ing any added value.

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