Microsoft goes all-out for RSS

Expanded support for Really Simple Syndication

Microsoft has promised to expand support for the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) web publishing standard in forthcoming versions of Internet Explorer and Longhorn.

During a session at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle last Friday, the company unveiled a set of RSS extensions for Longhorn. 

"The platform is going to unleash RSS in a bunch of ways," said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Longhorn browsing and RSS team in a video on Microsoft's Channel9 website for developers. 

"Now only the top three per cent of the web is using [RSS]. I want my mum to be using it."

Although RSS's roots go back further than weblogs, the technology was made popular by the personal online journals.

The technology is a sub-standard of XML and allows websites to push information to users instead of the user having manually to pull the data off the web.

RSS became popular as a means for visitors to stay up to date on blog postings without having to visit them. The technology has since been embraced by many online news publishers, including vnuet.com.

Users currently access feeds with special reader applications or online services such as Newsgator.

The Microsoft extensions allow files to be included in an RSS feed. This enables a sports team, for example, to publish an RSS feed with dates for upcoming games that is imported directly into the players' calendars.

Microsoft also demonstrated an application where a screen saver showed a slideshow of pictures from a photo blog.

RSS already supports the distribution of audio files to facilitate podcasts. Microsoft's additions not only enable additional file formats to be distributed via RSS, but move away from the standard's focus on news.

The new applications require extensions to the existing RSS standard that Microsoft plans to release under a creative commons licence.

The company will also add a central repository for RSS feeds to Windows that uses open APIs to allow third-party products to access the feeds to which a user subscribes.

The forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 is set to feature a special button that allows users to subscribe to RSS feeds more easily. A beta of the software is scheduled for release this summer. Microsoft has not yet revealed a projected release date.

In the forthcoming browser a button lights up when a page offers an RSS feed and lets users subscribe by clicking on it. Users currently have to look for the feed, or website owners have to add special buttons to point visitors to the feeds.