Microsoft Proposes RSS Extension

[BWF89]

3 words. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie said this week that his company is working on a new extension to RSS that would help users with different contact and calendar software and services synchronize each other's information." From the article: "If this sounds familiar to those using IBM's Lotus Notes, it should. SSE was conceived after Microsoft's recently recruited chief technology officer Ray Ozzie brainstormed with members of the Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile and Messenger Communicator product teams shortly after he joined."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/22/microsoft_rss_standard/

[blastus]

RSS has been forked several times to the point where there is no universally agreed upon and consistent RSS specification. Early versions of RSS were based on the contributions of Netscape and Userland's Dave Winer. These versions were based on an RSS XML vocabulary. However, RSS 1.0 is fully based on RDF, but RSS 2.0 is not. Then there's the Atom specification; an attempt to unify the differences between the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 branches. The RSS specification really ought to be based on RDF and submitted to and controlled by the W3C just like HTML, XML, RDF, RDFS, OWL, OWL-S and everything else. Until that happens, Microsoft should have no problem implementing their own incompatible RSS specification and foisting it on the Web.

[BWF89]

RSS has been forked several times to the point where there is no universally agreed upon and consistent RSS specification. Early versions of RSS were based on the contributions of Netscape and Userland's Dave Winer. These versions were based on an RSS XML vocabulary. However, RSS 1.0 is fully based on RDF, but RSS 2.0 is not. Then there's the Atom specification; an attempt to unify the differences between the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 branches. The RSS specification really ought to be based on RDF and submitted to and controlled by the W3C just like HTML, XML, RDF, RDFS, OWL, OWL-S and everything else. Until that happens, Microsoft should have no problem implementing their own incompatible RSS specification and foisting it on the Web.
Thanks for the history lesson.