In one of the worst kept secrets of GNOMEDEX, Microsoft’s IE team announced new support for RSS within the browser and Longhorn, as well as a set of non-hierarchical (in others words, non OPML) extensions list to the RSS 2.0 specification. Perhaps I’m missing the ultimate significance of such a featureset (haven’t had the chance to sit through the Channel 9 video yet), but at this point I’m of much the same mindset as James Snell – they’re sort of boring. As Asa says, many of the features are already present in some form in other browsers. They’ll have some good use cases, undoubtedly, but I haven’t gotten the “wow, this changes everything” impression that I expected from some the tone of some of the leaks.
But the announcement itself did include one interesting provision – the use of the Creative Commons license. This is an excellent decision by Microsoft. For quite some time we (meaning RedMonk) have been encouraging vendors to consider Creative Commons licenses, not least of which because we’ve found them to be excellent for our own use. By going this route, Microsoft not only gives itself an “open” card to play, it does so by playing nicely with one of the more progressive organizations out there.
Some rights reserved, indeed. Kudos to Microsoft on a solid move.
