Microsoft Extending RSS

Unlike some others, I don’t think that Microsoft Extending RSS is an entirely bad thing.

Can it be bad? Sure. But so can just about anything, by any company. I am the last to say that Microsoft is my favorite company – but the stuff they’ve done with RSS, merely be extending the spec (a move which is allowed, by the way) is pretty cool. I’m looking forward to it.

Should they have used Atom? Maybe, maybe not. Personally it seems to me that the Atom people complain about using RSS for things that Atom can handle – but why use Atom when RSS can handle it? Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black.

Update: Tristan Louis has some good thoughts about the announcement. Specifically that while Microsoft did their work okay, that RDF could have handled the work without any extending. While I don’t have a problem with RDF, many do.

So I’m not sure I agree that Microsoft gets an “F” on their research. By many counts, RSS 2.0 enjoys much broader support than RSS 1.0 (RDF), so extending that spec makes much more sense in a lot of cases. And let’s face it, almost any casual user simply looks at the version number and realizes that version 2.0 must be more recent than 1.0. While RDF has some really cool things going for it, I think at this point that it’s perhaps a done deal (even if it’s not exactly correct).