Longhorn (heart) RSS

Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Jun 24th, 2005 @ 10:26 AM | 232,118 Views | 146 Comments
Today Microsoft announced the addition of several new RSS features in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. The Longhorn Browsing and RSS team (the one we interviewed here) is also are announcing a new RSS extension, to be released into Creative Commons, that lets you do lists in subscriptions.

Check it out, first video demos of Longhorn and IE 7.

There are three demos.
   Demo One, at about 23:19. RSS in IE 7 and synchronization with other aggregators (like RSS Bandit)
   Demo Two, at about 34:00. Enclosures, calendar integration.
   Demo Three, at about 49:50. Amazon integration.

There isn't a download available for this yet. Sorry about that.
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#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 3:07 PM
Maurits
Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde
hillr wrote:

"What happens if there are multiple feeds on a page, but they are for different things? For example, lets say my company site has a "News" feed and a "CEO" feed, will IE7 only see the first one listed on the page?"


I am wondering about this too.  Some blogs have an RSS feed per category.  I could see a simple solution to this.  Make that RSS on IE7 be a button with a drop down.  Get the first (or default) feed when you click the button.  Press the drop down arrow and see all the other feeds you can subscribe to.



Likewise, some feeds are offered in multiple formats - there might be HTML and plaintext versions of the same feed.  Firefox's built-in RSS subscription method displays a menu of all available <link rel> feeds.

One solution for this is to continue to use orange XML buttons (yuck) but it would be nice if IE could offer a simple UI for this.

On other notes... certainly XML is a good way to distribute content.  Imagine an RSS patch-distribution system, or virus/spyware-definition-distribution system.  But I have to wonder how far generalization-of-RSS should be pushed.  I don't agree with the "RSS for everything" mantra.  Some things deserve to be their own XML specialization.  The location of one's orange sneakers, for example, is probably sufficiently different from news stories to have its own specification.  Similarly, a list of active job opportunities might benefit from having it's own XML specification, and might not be sufficiently RSS-ish to work as an RSS generalization.  If the RSS spec + extensions becomes too overly huge, it puts a correspondingly huge burden on applications that want to call themselves "RSS clients."
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 3:21 PM
Maurits
Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde
BruceMorgan wrote:
Note that with many websites, the autodiscovery list is not really multiple contents feeds so much as multiple content formats.  That's not really helpful to very many users.


But surely control should be given to the site publisher to decide how best to serve their user profiles.  Sites that are less technical in nature could simply scale back to a single feed option.  Ian Hickson could continue to offer plaintext and HTML formats of his feed.

EDIT: I don't mean to come off negative.  Integrated RSS is very cool.
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 3:35 PM
BruceMorgan
BruceMorgan
Maurits wrote:
But surely control should be given to the site publisher to decide how best to serve their user profiles.  Sites that are less technical in nature could simply scale back to a single feed option.  Ian Hickson could continue to offer plaintext and HTML formats of his feed.


What control? 

Nothing we're doing prevents a publisher from listing multiple feeds via autodiscovery. 

IE's RSS button will show the first one in the list because we chose simplicity over flexibility.  We had lots of debates about this, and I think we're making the right choice.

Thus he RSS button takes you to the feed, not dropping a menu of everything possible from the publisher. Our current plan is that IE7 will show the full list off a cascading menu item. 
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 3:47 PM
Maurits
Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde
BruceMorgan wrote:
Nothing we're doing prevents a publisher from listing multiple feeds via autodiscovery.


... yes it is.  I myself have a website on which I was going to offer multiple autodiscovery feeds (linked from the same HTML page, with different content.)  IE7's demoed behavior is causing me to change my mind - I'll  have to stick to orange XML buttons so that users won't get confused by the RSS button in the IE chrome.  Maybe I'll hack up a conditional comment to hide the autodiscovery feeds from IE7... ah, the irony...

Things should be as simple as possible - but no simpler.
    -- Albert Einstein
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 3:59 PM
eddwo
eddwo
Wheres my head at?
The IE7 RSS implementation seems very similar to Safari 2.0, not to say that it isn't a good one but it isn't super-awesome-new as the demo seemed to suggest.
OK the RSS button is on the toolbar and not in the address bar, but the rest is just the same. I was waiting to see a duplication of the content-length slider in Safari, expecially when he started talking about how long the RSS preview page was.

Whats the benifit of Calender items in RSS over vCal? iCal and Sunbird etc already support vCal subscriptions for  much the same effect. These standards already exist and are widely used outside of Microsoft's applications, why invent a new one?

Whats the interface that alerts the use when new items are available in the feeds, or does the user have to keep visiting the RSS preview page?

If any application can add items to the users feed list through the API then I expect to see malware automatically subscribing people to feeds that pop up advertising/pr0n every few minutes. What  controls are in place to prevent unwanted 3rd parties from adding to the list without permission, a registered RSS application whitelist? LUA wouldn't apply here since it is the user's own data. I certainly hope is isn't accessible to Javascript. I like the idea of a common platform, but you end up with monoculture issues pretty quickly.

IE7 is being released before Longhorn isn't it? So we should see these features sooner than 18 months.

Will there be at least a basic calender componant in Outlook Express for Longhorn, or do you have to have full Outlook?

 So when do we get Link Rel tags on Channel9 to subscribe to feeds of individual threads? Firefox already goes looking for them and comes up empty.

--damn language filter.
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 4:14 PM
Maurits
Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde
Orbit86 wrote:
Mauritis where did you get that Einstein quote?


Why, I made it up, of course... just like I make up all my facts. Wink

Seriously folks, it seems to be a folk attribution.  Here's a subtly different version cited on the VS2005 Team System blog
"Einstein reputedly said (although no one is quite sure), that a theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."

EDIT: And another version on a mug sold by the Exploratorium in San Francisco:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

EDIT2: Einstein usually spoke German, so maybe it got lost in translation.  His last words are lost, because his nurse didn't speak German.
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 4:16 PM
BruceMorgan
BruceMorgan
Maurits wrote:
BruceMorgan wrote: Nothing we're doing prevents a publisher from listing multiple feeds via autodiscovery.


... yes it is.  I myself have a website on which I was going to offer multiple autodiscovery feeds (linked from the same HTML page, with different content.)  IE7's demoed behavior is causing me to change my mind - I'll  have to stick to orange XML buttons so that users won't get confused by the RSS button in the IE chrome.  Maybe I'll hack up a conditional comment to hide the autodiscovery feeds from IE7... ah, the irony...

Things should be as simple as possible - but no simpler.
    -- Albert Einstein
There will be many more pages with one feed associated with the page than pages with multiple feeds (excluding format differences).

So quite frequently a dropdown approach would show either multiple formats (low value to end users) or it would be a single item list (no value to end users).  For pages like that, I think our RSS button has the right implementation.

For the less frequent "index of feeds" pages, then your approach of showing multiple feeds on the page is fine, IMHO. If there is no single "best feed" for the whole page, then it just might be a good idea to not use autodiscovery.  Your choice.
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 4:27 PM
Tom Servo
Tom Servo
W-hat?
Needs more Beta 1 availability!
#Jun 24th, 2005 @ 4:32 PM
Maurits
Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde
BruceMorgan wrote:
There will be many more pages with one feed associated with the page than pages with multiple feeds (excluding format differences).


Agreed.  It's a tricky UI problem.

Couldn't you have a button and a drop-down, show the button for sites with one feed, and show the drop-down for sites with multiple feeds?

Or just have a button, and if the site has multiple feeds, have the button pop up a dialog with a list of checkboxes, with only the first one checked by default?

I'm a little confused as to why you think multiple formats will be of low value to end users.  Surely that depends heavily on the audience.  Suppose the feed is a video feed - I imagine there's value in allowing at least three feed formats (Windows Media, QuickTime, Real...)

Or if the feed is a news site, there's value in allowing auto-sense subscription to any or all of the various "channel" content from the home page.

(Note the media player is an example of exclusive feed options, whereas the news channel is an example of inclusive feed options.)

With IE7 supporting feed autosense, I'm sure the RSS providers will be quick to reassess how their feeds are presented to browser users.  Look how quickly rel="alternate" links were added for Firefox, with a mere < 10% browser share.

EDIT: Or perhaps the answer is to allow publishers to specify an OPML file as an alternate link...
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