Blogging Roller

Microsoft made a series of RSS related announcements this week. They, like many others, have realized that RSS is not just for blogs anymore. It's for everything from package tracking, monitoring network events, distributing files, synchronizing calendars, DTrace, monitoring your motor fleet, sharing playlists, exchanging photos -- anything that you might want to subscribe to. RSS support should be built right-into the computing platform and that's what Microsoft is doing.

Note that they use the term RSS as a blanket term that refers to the "general concept of feeds of syndicated content." So, in the eyes of Microsoft, the term RSS also includes the new IETF standard Atom Publishing Format.

From what I've read so far, there are three announcements:

1. IE7 will include feed autodiscovery

Well, duh. Just like Safari RSS and Firefox do now, IE7 will recognize when a web page has a feed and will make it easy for you to subscribe to that feed.

2. Longhorn will include a built-in newsfeed datastore

Microsoft's new "Longhorn" OS will keep track of your feeds for you. You can organize them into folders will download them as needed (including an Podcasts or other enclosures they contain) and make them available for all of your applications. This is great for Windows-only application developers, because they no longer have to worry about parsing feeds, caching feeds and annoying things like ETags and HTTP conditional GET -- Longhorn will do that for you.

It's not clear what kind of user-interface will be provided with the Longhorn aggregator. Will it include a feed reader interface like FeedDemon or NetNewsWire or will Microsoft leave that for 3rd party developers?

In Java-land, ROME provides almost all the pieces you need to build such a feed datastore. It's got a parser that can handle any format and extensions. It's got a "fetcher" that fetches and caches feeds and plays nice with ETags, HTTP conditional GET, and FeedDiff. It's got an abstract data model that can represent any type of feed. That's why I say Microsoft is on the road to ROME too.

3. Longhorn will extend RSS to give it better list-handling capabilities

Microsoft's new Simple List Extensions Specification makes it easier to use a newsfeed as a sortable list of items. The extension looks pretty simple, but I believe it will break a lot of parsers because of the way it wraps existing elements (see Phil Ringnalda's post for example). Most feed extensions add new elements, but don't wrap existing elements in this way. ROME's extension handle might need to be redesigned to accommodate this type of extension.

This is all cool stuff and if you want to be able to do it in Java, then join up with the ROME project. Java can get there first.

References:

• Microsoft: RSS Support in Longhorn
• Microsoft: Simple List Extensions Specification
• Phil Ringnalda: MS embraces RSS