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Microsoft to Embrace RSS in IE7

By David Worthington, BetaNews

June 23, 2005, 4:15 PM

Microsoft is deepening its commitment to the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Web publishing standard and, according to a prominent blogger, will detail the level of its commitment on Friday at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle.

RSS, a standard used by bloggers and content providers to notify subscribers of new or updated content, is said to be of great interest to Microsoft.

Microsoft's interest lies in its desire to build upon the existing RSS standard and order syndicated data in different ways beyond "what's new." These new capabilities would benefit e-commerce and Web applications by enabling richer usage scenarios.

Some of these scenarios were touched upon in a blog entry by Dave Winer, one of the principals behind RSS.

"The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news. Like Audible's NY Times Best Seller list, or an iTunes music playlist, or lists of Sharepoint documents, or browser bookmarks," wrote Winer.

Mr. Winer also revealed his prescience of Microsoft's strategy to integrate RSS deeply into IE7 and the existence of a working group at Microsoft devoted strictly to the standard.

"On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that's just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg," Winer said.

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By EmilyW

posted Aug 2, 2007 - 6:47 AM

Hey, I wonder if there's someone who still believe that Microsoft the best.

Score: 0

By jimrthy

edited Jul 22, 2005 - 12:56 PM

Yes, Microsoft is *great* at anticipating new technologies a few years after the geeks have worked out the details for them. Then barrelling in and totally destroying the standards.

Score: 0

By Red Ripe Apple

posted Jun 26, 2005 - 2:33 PM

Once again Microsoft leads the way.
Did i say lead, I ment copy, of course.

Score: 0

By prod

edited Jun 23, 2005 - 5:46 PM

i think this should be interesting to see....

i use rss a lot....i just have it sent to my tb and at the end of the day i can check a list off all the new stuff thats happened in one place

i have betanews, /. and a few others all in one place...and NO LOAD TIMES (cept for program load times :P)

Score: 0

By disquiet

edited Jun 24, 2005 - 2:15 PM

I am just throwing a question out here... What are the security repercussions of this? If RSS is "deeply integrated" into IE7 does that mean they are opening up a new hole/holes?
If IE is always listening for new feeds couldn’t someone send data that seemed like a legit feed and it be spam/virus/badness?

Also assume you are on a small business network, and you have 30 people checking 100 feeds constantly. Will this have a big impact on network performance?

Just wondering :)

Score: 0

By rawd

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 12:21 PM

IE7 is going to rawk! can't wait

Score: 0

By dakuda

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 11:35 AM

This part concerns me:
"Microsoft's interest lies in its desire to build upon the existing RSS standard and order syndicated data in different ways beyond "what's new." These new capabilities would benefit e-commerce and Web applications by enabling richer usage scenarios."

How much will they change it so that only IE users can view the 'new' feeds?

Score: 0

By Mystiqq

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 4:36 AM

Suprisingly...

Man, M$ dudes are smart!

Score: 0

By richwise

posted Jun 23, 2005 - 8:15 PM

I'm scared about Microsoft getting involved in RSS...anyone remember the failed experiment with "channels" in IE4?

Score: 0

By deadmonkey

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 4:13 AM

Channels and RSS are very different technologies. Not to mention channels were a nwe concept by Microsoft whereas RSS is pretty well establised now. Every major news site has rss feeds and almost every other site that contains dynamic content has some form of rss content as well.

Microsoft realise that RSS is like a mini www. It allows you to get content quickly without all the extra stuff like graphics. It also allows you to easily read news offline or on limited bandwidth connections.

If you are still worried then check out all the Microsoft rss feeds that are available today. They are excellent, full of information and all available at the touch of a button. I use FeedDemon so these new features in IE don't really make any difference to me but I hope that it allows more people to take advantage of RSS as it is an excellent way of getting information delivered to the user with very little work. Once you are subscribed, thats it. You keep getting updates every few hours. Not to mention it is heaps faster to read an RSS feed than a webpage.

One of the driving factors behind this addition to IE7 has to be that Microsoft have a lot of RSS feeds available on their website yet offer no tool to access them with whereas Firefox does! I am guessing Microsoft do not like hearing that their users are switching to Firefox (or Thunderbird) to access their RSS feeds. Updating IE to support this is a nice, simple way to give users an RSS reader without having to make a seperate application.

Score: 0

By KSzostek

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 10:33 PM

deadmonkey you made some excellent points. Thanks

Score: 0

By GoodThings2Life

posted Jun 23, 2005 - 5:13 PM

OK, so this is a topic I'm a bit inexperienced with... Maybe I just don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that RSS is the lazy man's way of browsing the web. I have a page with a series of my favorite links that I check at times in the day that are convenient for me, and I never once feel like I'm "slow" or "late" getting the news. Maybe that's because I have a job that allows me to sit at my computer all day and check them whenever I want. Whatever my issue is, I just don't see RSS as that important.

Score: 0

By Aires

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 4:13 AM

I agree. My brother enthuses about RSS but myself I can't see the point.

Score: 0

By deadmonkey

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 4:23 AM

The point is that information comes to you not you having to go and find the information.

You find a feed you like, say BBC News, now rather than go to the BBC News website every few hours to read updates you just subscribe to their RSS feed and set it to check for updates every 2 hours or so. When you need it has a new item (The RSS reader I use does a little popup like Outlook 2003) you have a quick look on the new items to see if any of them interest you. If nothing is of any interest you set them to read or delete them and come back when it has new items.

With one source RSS probably isn't a great solution however with several hundred it can save hours of wasted time checking sites when their is nothing new. Also, depending on the client, RSS feeds are searchable so you can setup search filters so you only see items which contain key words you are interested in.

The reason so many people love RSS is that it saves you time and puts all of your data in 1 place. You no longer have to search 30 websites, you can subscribe to their RSS feeds and those 30 sites are then accessible in one application.

Score: 0

By gawd21

edited Jun 24, 2005 - 2:46 PM

That sounds more like a bother that anything else. I only want to read certin news and there is no way any RSS could know only what I want to read. I would rather stick to checking the sites myself. RSS just seems to be a problem waiting to happen. Someone somewhere will hack it and hard.

Score: 0

By deadmonkey

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 5:04 PM

And thats fine. RSS isn't for you. However it is for me and a lot of other people.

As for "there is no way any RSS could know only what I want to read" why do you say that? I have searchs setup in my rss reader that shows me items that contain keywords I enter. When I tell it I want to know about rss feeds that contain "Internet Explorer" and "7" it does just that. Sure a few things are added/lost but nothing is perfect and they are so far and few it isn't an issue (to me at least).

Also how will "someone hack it and hard"? It is just text in a file. You can't "hack it".

The concept works very well, look at newsgroups with filters. You subscribe to a newsgroup which interests you (say one on football) and you setup a filter on your favourite team (sat Arsenal). Whenever you update that newsgroup it automatically highlights the items that contain the keywords you setup in the Arsenal search. RSS is basically the same idea except for the group you subscribe to is a sites rss feed.

As an example I usee RSS at work for the MSDN feeds. Whenever something is added to the MSDN subscription download site the feed they have for this is updated. I can see right away what has been added/removed in the past few weeks. I can have searches to highlight new products that are being released so I know as soon as they are available on the website. This saves me checking the site (be it the MSDN downloads site or the web based subscriptions info page both of which require me to manually search).

I also use RSS at work to distrbute who is not in the office today. Users complain they would get so many "Bill is off sick todady" emails that I setup an RSS feed. They can point their RSS reader to it and check it quickly without being spammed with 15 messages about people who are off sick. Also as RSS is just XML it can be accessed in a web browser just as easily because we can format the XML using stylesheets and xslt.

RSS isn't going to go anywhere anytime soon because it allows data to be easily distributed to users without the user having to do anything after they have subscribed.

Score: 0

By gawd21

edited Jun 24, 2005 - 5:53 PM

"Also how will "someone hack it and hard"? It is just text in a file. You can't "hack it". "
Sound and video files were just that too.
I just don't like to use it and I won't for now. That is my opinion. You have yours. I was just giving my side to it as well.

Score: 0

By morriscox

posted Jun 30, 2005 - 9:34 PM

Sound and video files were never text. A payload can be put in a binary file (of whatever sort). It's not so easy in a text file. I do know about ANSI bombs, however, I don't see them as being a problem.

One of the main reasons that I like RSS is that I can get the stuff I want in a much more effective and efficent way. It is also XML based so I have many options, including possibly converting to VoiceXML for text-to-speech.

Score: 0

By deadmonkey

posted Jun 26, 2005 - 2:42 PM

I understand what you mean but you use a web browser at the moment don't you? Its basically the same thing really just a slightly different way of doing things.

As you said tho your opinion is different and thats cool. I hope that some of your concerns are addressed so that you (as I am sure there are others with the same opinion) see RSS as such a good thing as I do :)

Score: 0

By SrLnclt

posted Jun 23, 2005 - 9:15 PM

I also have a links page I made for myself with the sites I visit most frequently which I use as my homepage. Seemed faster/easier than bookmarks and I can do stuff like access them from any PC without logging into any sites or anything.

But the last few months I have been using RSS as well. Just like for me it was easier clicking links on my homepage to open tabs for the sites I want to check instead of pulling up bookmarks or whatever, RSS is easier since it lets me sift through dozens of headlines from many different sites at once and only read what I want.

But just cause I like things faster/easier I dont think I would call myself lazy. Well - not because of that anyway :p

Score: 0

By yohimbe9

posted Jun 23, 2005 - 5:59 PM

like you said, it depends on where and how you use it. if you go to start.com you can add feeds to that and just check that one page instead of your jump page and all subsequent links. if you're on a smaller device like a phone where its hard to browse its nice to have the information just shot at you. also, as a developer its nice to be able to pull content from other sites in a uniform matter. previously we had to use a technique called screen scraping that was very fragile. but like you, in general i just go visit the sites i want when i want.

Score: 0

By dex23462

posted Jun 23, 2005 - 4:48 PM

This is good news except I am weary of Microsoft staying true to form and developing a Microsoft RSS standard that won't be compatible with existing aggregators (thus requiring one to use the Microsoft product). Let's hope this won't be the case.

Score: 0

By dragontron3k

posted Jun 24, 2005 - 9:20 AM

I dunno. The feeling I get from this article and the one from Bink.nu is that Microsoft might want to push for their extension to be standardized. This would be a much smarter step than not pushing for standardization, because it would be more widely adopted, and IE users would get better value out of the RSS features of IE7. Then again, this is Microsoft...

Score: 0

By bourgeoisdude

posted Jun 23, 2005 - 5:25 PM

Well since FF is trying to 'out-feature' IE it is possible MS is striking where FF cannot strike back--

Score: 0

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