There recently has been some commotion over the fact that Microsoft is introducing RSS support in the new Internet Explorer 7 (which is great), but they call them “web feeds”. Oh! My! God! They are so evil!
Actually, Microsoft has a point. Currently RSS is being used as a format to deliver all kinds of different stuff: blog posts, podcasts, images, videos, search results, weather reports, stock quotes, … While they all use RSS as underlying format, they are not all the same ‘kind’ of information. I think it makes sense to distinguish between the technology/standard format “RSS” and the usages it enjoys.
So you could have:
- Web feeds: feeds from blogs or other web sites
- Podcast or Audiofeeds: been around for over a year now, started out as RSS 2.0 + MP3 enclosures, but now also implies Apple iTunes and Yahoo Media extensions.
- Photofeeds: a bit like the podcasting for images, supported by the likes of Flickr, Smugmug and Pixagogo
- Videofeeds for ‘vlogs’: the logical successor of podcasts, but here the main issue will be: formats! Whereas MP3 works on almost every machine, there is no such universal format for video. MPG (MPEG-2)? WMV (Windows Media)? MOV (QuickTime)?
- Search feeds: the result of a search operation as a RSS feed, from MSN, Technorati, Feedster or Blogdigger
- Stock feeds: would contain Index, Change, Day’s Range and Year’s Range in specific extensions
- Weather feeds: would contain expected temperature, humidity, precipitation so your domotica system can open windows or light the heater
- …
In this logic the term ‘feed’ would be synonymous for ‘based upon RSS’, and this means: a ‘channel’ with one or more ‘items’, each one with at least a date, a unique ID and a title. (RSS is the cornerstone of the ‘reverse chronological’ movement)
Some of the arguments against
- “Everyone calls it RSS”
- I give you: Firefox’s Live Bookmarks
- “But RSS has this whole ‘brand’ recognition thing going for it!”
- Not really. Maybe for us web geeks, but not for Mr/Mrs Average Webuser. It is true that people like Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor have invested a lot of effort in evangilizing the usage of RSS, and that’s very good. It’s not because Microsoft picks a more sexy name that the standard will vanish, on the contrary.
- “RSS is not per-se a difficult/unsexy name”
- Of course people can remember acronyms, but only if they can visualize what they stand for:
- a DVD is like a CD: same size, slightly different colour. They contain movies.
- VHS cassettes are black and chunky. They contained movies in the previous century.
- A GSM is like a phone with no wires (unless you’re charging it).
- An SUV is a really big car to go shopping with
But try to explain a non-technical person the differences between HTML and HTTP, CSS and PHP?
- “Everyone uses the
or 
button on their site to indicate their feed.”
- Glad you mentioned that. Why exactly would an orange [XML] button mean RSS? Isn’t Atom also XML? Isn’t KML, SOAP, … also XML? I would love to see the [XML] buttons disappear. Indicate what is important: a videofeed, OK, but is it QuickTime, DivX or Windows Media?
- “Dave says we should stick with RSS”
- Dave’s contribution to the popularity of RSS is quite considerable and he surely is entitled to his opinion. But I don’t agree on the naming issue.
- “It’s not good to have multiple terms to refer to the same thing”
- Correct. But it’s not because 2 systems use RSS as delivery format that they are the same thing. RSS is no longer just a way to syndicate blog postings, it’s become a building block, a bit like HTML and CSS. Personally I am more bothered in the case of folksonomy: tags = keywords = labels. That’s confusing!
- “Microsoft should also support Atom.”
- Atom is a comatose patient that is being kept alive by Google/Blogger. Once Blogger starts using RSS, they will have to pull the plug.
Technorati: rss – syndication – blogs – photofeed
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