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23 November, 2005

Here we go again

For years, web designers have been struggling with IE-only varients of html devised by Microsoft not so much failing to comply with but completely ignoring industry standards.  They characterised it as 'extending capabilities' (<marquee> tag, anyone?), but it was just ****ing annoying, and anything worthwhile can be done by remaining within standards.

Now it seems MS are ****ing about with proprietory 'extensions' of RSS, to be used by IE7 and WinVista.

Well, this time I'm not playing. So long as they work in that 'browser' (very much in quotes; I don't think IE6 qualifies as a true, modern web browser, anyway) and OS, I'll be sticking with standards-compliant feeds, and I recommend that everyone else rejects superfluous gimmicks.

Posted by Ministry at 12:58 | 119 words
Comments

The extensions are released under a Creative Commons license and are properly documented. There's nothing to stop other developers adopting them, and RSS has always been extensible anyway. I use quite a number of extensions in my RSS feed - in fact, your feed uses 4 extensions (Dublin Core, Syndication, Admin and Resource Description Framework).

Posted by Neil T. at November 23, 2005 02:41 PM

Oops. My mistake. I was extrapolating past misdeeds to a new situation. Sorry, Microsoft!

Creative Commons, on the other hand....

My remaining (insubstantiated!) concern is just how optional the MS extensions are. You say other developers can adopt them, but can other developers not adopt them? Will RSS feeds only work in IE7 or WinVista-based apps if they're coded the MS way?

Posted by NRT at November 23, 2005 02:47 PM
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