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Windows Vista and RSS
About Windows Vista and RSS. Vista is definitely going to have support for RSS when it finally comes out based on their initial report for Vista RSS support. Based on their article, we also know the following to be true (excerpted from the article).RSS Today
Every major online news site syndicates their news stories via an RSS feed, and several other sites are making their content syndicated via RSS. The impact of RSS cannot be denied.
Today, RSS is primarily used for news sites and blogs, and increasingly for audio-based serialized content—but it has the potential both to have broader reach and to more deeply integrate the information it delivers across applications of various kinds.
About the Format
To understand a little more about how (and why) RSS works, we must take a look at the format. RSS, as we use it in this document, refers not to a single format (such as RSS 2.0), but to the general concept of feeds of syndicated content. It should be considered to cover all feed formats that meet the basic criteria of updateable collections of items.
The most popular format, and the standard format used in most of the descriptions in this document, is RSS 2.0, authored by Dave Winer (see references). RSS 2.0, like most of the other RSS feed formats, is a simple XML-based format originally intended for syndicating or summarizing content that is available on a Web site.
An RSS feed typicallycontains the most recent items published on that Web site. For example, a news Web site may make summaries of stories available via an RSS feed on its Web site. A blogger may make available an RSS feed of the most recent articles he has posted to his blog.
RSS 2.0 also includes a simple extension mechanism that allows publishers and clients to define additional elements to include in a feed. RSS 2.0 also introduced the concept of enclosures—a lightweight way of attaching a file to an item within a feed.
One reason behind the success of RSS is both its simplicity and breadth. RSS 2.0 has a simple vocabulary consisting of just a handful of XML elements. These elements are good at representing everything from software updates to news articles to blog posts. This flexibility has made it possible for a diverse collection of sites to adopt RSS for various needs.
It's a pretty good guess that Vista is going to have RSS support integrated into it.
The RSS platform support in Longhorn has three parts:
Common RSS Feed List gives application developers access to the list of feeds to which the user is subscribed.
Common RSS Data Store is a common data store that provides a single location where applications can access any content that has been downloaded to the PC via RSS—including text, pictures, audio, calendar events, documents, and just about anything else. All applications will have access to this content for creating rich user experiences.
RSS Platform Sync Engine automatically downloads data and files (enclosures) for use by any application. It is designed to be as efficient as possible when downloading this information, using idle network bandwidth whenever possible, in order to limit the impact on the user's Internet experience. Developers can use the platform to get RSS data without having to manage details like synchronization schedules or subscriptions.
The article goes into a lot of interesting ways that Microsoft may plan to extend the current blogging model in Vista and gives a lot of examples as well. Once again you can read the article here.
Microsoft also talk about extending RSS support in Internet Explorer 7. Learn more about IE 7 here.
On theirthey describe the IE7/Vista experience as the following:
"Internet Explorer 7 also provides new tools to give you direct access to information you want, with built-in support for web feeds known as Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS is a technology you can use to have information sent to you, so you don't have to look for it. Through RSS subscriptions, you can automatically receive feeds (lists) of headlines from Internet sites. Internet Explorer 7 discovers these feeds on sites and allows you to preview and subscribe to them. Once you subscribe, Internet Explorer 7 systematically consolidates headlines from each feed into one list. This lets you quickly browse new information from various sites without having to visit each site separately." |
Apparently, when a user subscribes to an RSS feed in IE 7, the feed is added to the Common Feed List that makes it available to other newsreaders like RSS Bandit or Feed Demon. The Windows RSS platform downloads fresh feed content in the background on a regular schedule. Applications integrated with the common feed store can toggle this read or unread status for a shared item view across multiple applications. Microsoft's feed engine downloads service adjusts its bandwidth usage based on the activity of other applications and handles network dropouts and computer restarts without interrupting the file download.
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We will continue to investigate what the RSS technology stack will look like in the finished product and bring you the details ASAP.