greg hughes - dot net - Microsoft demos IE7 and RSS in Longhorn at Gnomedex

Friday, 24 June 2005

Microsoft demos IE7 and RSS in Longhorn at Gnomedex

Dean Hachamovitch of Microsoft is presenting here right now. They are showing Internet Explorer 7 for the first time in public.

Longhorn <3 RSS. They are betting big on RSS. Throughout Windows, RSS is there. For end users as well as developers. They've done some extensions.

Syndication is powerful and amazing, Dean says. Microsoft has figured that out. Nowadays RSS feeds are everywhere. Microsoft is working to get on the train.

First "Browse," then "Search." Now, "Subscribe."

On Build 5087 of Longhorn, first IE7 public view. If there's a feed on a page, IE7 let's you click an orange button to preview the feed, and then you can parse through it for content using search.

One button is used to either bookmark a page or subscribe to a feed - depends on context of what your viewing.

Search RSS results in MSN search. Nice.

By the way, this build of IE7 is nice and clean. Not too shiny. But IE7 is a bit of an aside in this presentation - its all about the RSS extensions.

Common feed lists: Sync your aggregator's feed list with the system list.

Platform: Goal is to take care of a lot of the complexity in the platform to simplify it for both the developer and the end user.

RSS entended - calendars. For each event, create an item and enclose an icalendar item (.ics file). Subscribe and you've got a calendar set up in outlook that you can view side-by-side. The idea here is to provide a common feed list at the platform level, and making every application aware and capable of consuming. Apps can understand and deal with RSS feeds. ICS files are understood universally by calendaring apps - its not just for Outlook.

Another example: Photoblogs. Provide the platform plumbing to allow consumption of the content - title, text, image enclosure. They made a screen saver slide show using this, which captions each image in a rotation. The platform handles things like handling the network traffic, parsing and subscribing.

Lists: Microsoft's approach to lists is one where I have different types of lists where the list type has class-a meaning. Extentions to RSS allow a publisher to define a feed specifically as a list, and to describe the data in that feed.

Example: Wish list at an online store. Amanon wish lists with RSS feeds. I want to subscribe to it. If I do that, and the list changes (like the list owner removes items, re-orders thems, etc), RSS today can't handle that. The new extention (one tag) allows the needed functionality.

Using namespace extensions you can add metadata (like EXIF, book info, etc). But how do you know what to do with that new data once you have it?

If a content publisher declares certain item types appear in a list, I should be able to filter and sort on certain data. Simple controls allow the web service to define how the data is experienced. This is a little hard to understand, until you realize all the content manipulation is all on the client, and you can munge the list any way you want as a developer.

I think its obvious how this will work into, say, SharePoint. That will be cool.

And the Simple List Extensions specification, which extends RSS 2.0 will be open and licensed under a Creative Commons license. Anyone can use it anywhere. Nice.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/ for more, and today at noon the spec will be available to view.

Code will be in developers' hands at PDC 2005.

Add/Read: Comments [0]

Friday, 24 June 2005 10:23:13 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Trackback

Referred by:
http://search.daum.net/ [Referral]

Comments are closed.