So today at Gnomedex Microsoft will be announcing extended support for RSS. Read that carefully, we’re not talking about better support for RSS, we’re talking about an extension to RSS. They want to be able to do e-commerce via RSS. Yes, you read that correctly. The last thing we need now is yet another fork in the RSS spec. It reminds me of the days where there was regular standards-compliant DOM and then there was Microsoft DOM. Is it the case that every time we take one little baby step forward (getting all browsers “somewhat” standard compliant) that we must take five leaps backward (MS DOM, MS extensions to (x)HTML and CSS, and now extensions to RSS)? I feel another petition coming one. All hail Dave Winer, the guy who knows how to screw a good thing up. In your frantic race to extend RSS, let’s not forget about Atom guys.
