RSS and Microsoft

With all the announcements lately about Microsoft and RSS I have been wondering what this will mean for RSS. Microsoft will be supporting RSS in its new version of Windows and Internet Explorer. You might be thinking so what.

There are two changes we are likely to see. The first is that Microsoft will claim that they invented RSS and that RSS is a good idea. Of course I am being pedantic but from an end users point of view with RSS so well integrated into Microsoft software it will seem that RSS is a part of Microsoft.

For the end user and many webmasters I believe this will generally be beneficial to RSS as a whole as RSS will become more mainstream. Some users are struggling with subscribing to RSS feeds especially when they have no idea what RSS is. A user clicks on the XML or RSS icon and gets a page of nonsense, their not going to subscribe to that.

I'm speculating here but I would imagine IE7 will allow a user to click on an RSS button and this will ask the user if they want to subscribe to this sites RSS feed. I am not going to complain if they are going to make it that easy but I am sure some of the developers of RSS readers are not going to be too happy.

The thing I am concerned about though is when Microsoft start messing about with standards. As I understand it a list extension is already being introduced into RSS. Remember when Internet Explorer started to implement it's own version of HTML, I sure don't want to see that happen to RSS.

Overall I am sure that most people will be happy with the Microsoft adoption of RSS, I sure wouldn't mind if it meant my RSS subscriber base increased. Sure RSS is a great tool for webmasters and subscribers alike and anything that improves the current situation can only be good. Just keep an eye out for what Microsoft has up its sleeve.