IE 7 to Jump on the RSS Bandwagon — Should You Hop On Too? A Few Issues Remain Open for Discussion Brian Livingston
Licensing Microsoft Technology To All
Because Microsoft is a dominant presence in PC computing, its avowed support of RSS was met with some skepticism from the bloggers assembled at the Gnomedex conference. In particular, the IE developers' announcement that they would support new tags for the creation of "lists" within RSS feeds was met with criticism that this advance had not been submitted to Internet standards bodies.
Hachamovitch seemed to have successfully met this criticism by explaining that the new "list" tags would be released under a Creative Commons license. Under such a license, works can be used and modified by people other than the creators for free.
The IE developers showed a short video made by Lawrence Lessig, the founder and chairman of the Creative Commons. In the video, Lessig endorsed Microsoft's use of the license and said the corporation's openness seemed to be genuine.
In an interview at the conference, Dan Gillmor, the founder ofBayosphere.com and a prolific blogger, said of Microsoft's new approach, "I don't see any downside unless they create a proprietary standard or fork what is a fairly simple and useful technology." Gillmor added, "If Lessig is happy with it, I'm inclined to support it."
A Few Other Issues Remain Open
Other questions won't be answered until a public beta-testing phase of IE 7 actually begins. Some bloggers, for example, criticized the proposed "RSS preview" button, saying that clicking an RSS icon should simply result in a 1-click subscription. Because a Web page that offers an RSS feed is, by definition, a preview of what will be in that feed, a separate "RSS preview" button hardly seems necessary.
In an interview after the IE presentation, Hachamovitch told me, "We have not yet decided on the final user experience." He and other IE developers said a healthy discussion was taking place within their group about whether there should be one, two, or even three icons to handle RSS functions, with the possible addition of a separate "show all feeds" icon.
Hachamovitch said only one thing was known for sure: "When you click the orange XML buttons inside Web pages, IE 7 will show a rich preview of the feed." He added that the first beta of IE probably won't have an RSS button on its toolbar, as his group tries to work out the user-interface issues before locking them down.
In whatever way RSS is implemented within IE 7, the new browser will definitely give RSS feeds a big push. If your company isn't taking advantage of RSS — either publishing feeds or reading them — now's the time to get started.
In my column next week, I'll discuss RSS readers and which ones might best fit your company's needs.
