Microsoft’s next-gen browser, Internet Explorer 7, will apparently only support well-formed XML-based RSS feeds. This may seem like a good step towards valid code usage on the net but if Microsoft’s going to be the one deciding what is “well-formed XML,” we are going to be in for a wild ride. If Microsoft has their way, I’m pretty sure not even FeedBurner feeds will validate as well-formed. Overall, I think the move to usher in an RSS standard is a good thing, I’m just a little skeptical when Microsoft tries to start the standard. I mean, they made Windows Anti-Spyware, recently named “Windows Defender” that would erroneously delete software it thought was bad.
You can read the original article on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog. I also recommend taking a look at Roger Johansson’s take on this tidbit.
Our years of experience in with HTML in Internet Explorer have taught us the long-term pain that results from being too liberal with what you accept from others. Hence, we’ve adopted the following overriding principle for IE 7 and RSS platform in Windows Vista:
We will only support feeds that are well-formed XML.
Update: Here’s the article on Digg.
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If by well-formed, they mean valid (and by valid I mean conforms to the spec) feeds – good, that just makes sure everyone will have to make valid feeds and programmers don’t have to spend much time dealing with error correction for malformed feeds. I wonder if Microsoft will support Atom.
I think “well-formed XML” covers most of the bases. It doesn’t even imply that the RSS flavors will be preferred over Atom; hopefully it just means that services like Xanga (shudder) will have to get their act together to produce valid XML feeds in order to support what will (regrettably but most likely) become the new most popular browser.