Microsoft, never happy with anyone else doing something first, has outlined a set of new extensions to RSS. It doesn't seem to matter to them that the RSS 2.0 standard is closed, that changes should probably be submitted to the RSS 3.0 specification.

The changes are called SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) and are intended for both RSS and OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), although I'm only focusing here on the RSS aspects.

All Microsoft-bashing aside, however, both the RSS, RDF and Atom formats of "web feeds" (Microsoft's moniker for RSS, but applicable to Atom) do need some fleshing out in terms of features if future growth into "killer web feed applications" is to be sustained.

Here's a very brief summary of the salient points:

• The main intent of SSE is to enable sharing of feed content items.
• There is a new XML namespace. It's used as follows: <rss version=2.0 xmlns:sx="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/sse">
• An SSE-extended RSS feed can incorporate the items of another feed into its own feed. For example, if endpoint A produces Feed-A, endpoint B can subscribe to Feed-A and add its own items to generate Feed-B. Whenever items in Feed-A are added or updated, Feed-B will reflect the change.
• If endpoint A in turn subscribes to Feed-B, and if Feed-B adds or updates an item, Feed-A will reflect this as well.

In general, this allows for the combining of web feeds that I talked about in an earlier post. I'll try to talk further about SSE in upcoming posts, after I read the full draft and absorb the content. Entries will be posted to the "RSS Development" and "RSS Marketing" threads.

Links:

• The Register has an article about the RSS extensions. It is the original source of this post.


• Microsoft's SSE draft, published under a Creative Commons license.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/