Microsoft Promises RSS 2.0 Support in Longhorn

Steve Ballmer reportedly considers RSS "a little too simple," but damnation by faint praise by Microsoft's CEO hasn't prevented the Longhorn team from climbing on the RSS bandwagon. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for Longhorn browsing and RSS announced in a June 24, 2005 keynote speech at the Gnomedex 5.0 conference that Longhorn will include support for RSS with a Common RSS Feed List and Data Store, plus an RSS Platform Feed Engine. Hachamovitch also proposed a specification for an RSS extension to support ordered lists. Despite its release under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license, the "Simple List Extensions Specification" generated an extraordinary amount of third-party blogging and comment activity, much of which was uninformed. The next day, a Longhorn RSS Team Blog opened with a post from Sean Lyndersay, senior program manager on Microsoft's RSS team and majordomo of the MSDN IEBlog. Developer feedback is handled by Channel9 Longhorn RSS and SimpleListExtensions WIKIs. Unfortunately, the RSS in Longhorn announcement occurred about three weeks after the publication date of my "Longhorn Redux" FTPOnline article, which concentrated on consumer features and IIS 7.0. It's good to see a feature added to—instead of removed or borrowed from—Longhorn for a change. --rj