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Longhorn Team RSS Blog

All about RSS and feed technology at Microsoft and across the community


The RSS Platform User-Agent StringFebruary 27

On the IE blog, Eric Lawrence presented the User-Agent string for the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 which will be available later this year. The RSS Platform will also introduce an updated User-Agent string for use with the IE8 beta. For details on the RSS Platform User-Agent string in IE7 please take a look at my past blog post.

The change is a simple increment of the version number to "2.0" as in

Windows-RSS-Platform/2.0 (MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)

And as before, note that there are two cases to keep in mind:

  1. The user is not subscribed to the feed. The user navigates to a feed and IE presents a preview of the content.
  2. The user is subscribed to the feed. The RSS Platform retrieves the feed content on a schedule (or on demand).

In the first case, the request is made by IE and hence the IE User-Agent string is used.

In the second case, the RSS Platform User-Agent string is used.

- Walter vonKoch
Program Manager

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Windows Live Suite has lots of RSS goodnessSeptember 18 2007

A couple weeks ago, Chris Jones (VP on the Windows Live team) announced the new Windows Live suite. Included in this suite are two things of potential interest to readers of this blog:

First, the beta release of Windows Live Mail -- a desktop email client like Outlook Express or Windows Mail for Vista. What makes it even more interesting is that includes support for reading RSS feeds (based on the Windows RSS Platform -- so anything you subscribed to using IE7 is automatically available in Windows Live Mail).

Windows Live Mail is great for those who like their feeds in a mail-like "three-pane" view. Brandon LeBlanc wrote about using Windows Live Mail as an RSS reader not too long ago on the Windows Experience blog. Read more about the beta release on the Windows Live Mail team blog.

Second, the suite includes an update to Windows Live Writer - a fantastic blogging tool (that I've written about before) with support for dozens of blogging services. Read about Writer on the

Simple Sharing Extensions spec updatesJuly 28 2007

You’ve probably seen the postings in the past on this blog about the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS. SSE was originally introduced by Ray Ozzie on his blog as a way to enable syncing items between different points on the web. We’ve recently updated the spec to support Atom feeds as well.

I posted the latest Simple Sharing Extensions spec to MSDN last month, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/rss/sse. I’ve received a bunch of great comments and suggestions on the spec, and I’m in the process of incorporating those into a new draft. I’ll be sending out the proposed updates to the FEED-TECH list over the next few days. You can see the first change set here. I’ll also be discussing these changes on my personal blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/stevenlees.

It would be great to hear people’s thoughts about the spec and the updates. The best way to respond is to join the FEED-TECH list and post your comments there. Thanks!

--Steven

RSS 2.0 Best Practices Profile draft releasedJune 5 2007

One of the great things about RSS is that it's being used all over the world in countless ways. Millions of sites publish RSS feeds and hundreds of products consume those same feeds. The downside of this popularity, however, is that with that many implementations, there's bound to be some variance in how and when sites implement the specification. This can make it tricky for publishers and consumers to figure out how to implement some of the less-frequently-used features of the specification.

For the past few years, the RSS Advisory Board and the many hard-working and dedicated people on the RSS-public mailing list have been working hard to document how popular readers and services have implemented the specification, with the goal of helping publishers and consumers understand how best to get what they want.

The board recently published another draft (version 1.20) of the RSS 2.0 Best Practices Profile, which includes information on how various consumers use the <ttl> element, as well how to implement some commonly-used RSS extensions (like the Dublin Core and Slash extensions).

The profile is still evolving, so, if you're interested in getting involved, the best place to start is on the RSS-public mailing list. If you're implem

Reading feeds in Right-to-Left orderMay 17 2007

In the last few weeks, we have got some questions about how to display the IE7 Feed View in RTL (Right-To-Left) reading order, which is used by several languages.

The good news: we do have support for RTL.

IE decides whether to show a feed in RTL reading order based on one of three things:

  • The language that the feed publisher specifies in the feed
  • The default language of the browser (only if the publisher does not specify a feed language).
  • The manual reading order selection that the user makes (overrides either of the previous two)

If you are a publisher of an RSS Feed, here is what you need to do to make it show correctly.

IE‘s Feed View is looking for the RSS 2.0 language element (e.g. <language>en-us</language>), or the XML xml:lang attribute for Atom 1.0 feeds (<feed xml:lang="en">)  to determine which direction the feed page should have.

If the language the publisher indicates is known to be displayed RTL by default, IE will automatically switch the ordering. In this examples above (en is "English"), the feed will display as LTR (Left-To-Right). Conversely, if the language element is set to Arabic (<language>ar-SA</language> or just <language>ar</language> for RSS 2.0) the feed will be displayed in RTL (Right-To-Left) order.

Here is what the header of the feed should look like. The value of the language element should be