Microsoft RSS Blog : RSS Support in IE

Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

rss — Fri, 18 May 2007 00:37:00 GMT

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 changed to any of the values shown below, depending on the language of the content you are trying to display.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
   <rss version="2.0"><channel>
   <title>BBC Arabic News | الصفحة الرئيسية</title>
   <link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/hi/arabic/news/default.stm</link>
<language>ar</language>
...

(You can see this feed live in IE here to see what RTL feeds look like).

Atom 1.0 header should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="ar">

The following languages will be displayed as RTL by default:

Arabic (ar-**)
Farsi (fa-**)
Urdu (ur-**)
Pashtu (ps-**)
Syriac (syr-**)
Divehi (dv-**)
Hebrew (he-**)
Yiddish (yi-**)

Please note: the language value must be in lowercase (e.g. ar-SA, he-IL, ur-PK, etc.). The second part of the value (which typically indicates the region), is not used in any way by IE's feed view, and may be omitted.

When the language tag is not included by the publisher, the default IE language is used. For example, if you’re using an English version of IE, then all feeds without the language element are treated as LTR. If you’re using a Hebrew version of IE, then a feed without the language element is treated as RTL.

Finally, there are times when the feed’s language is different from the default language, and the feed language element is not set by the publisher. In this case, you can manually change the layout to RTL or LTR using the Page menu, encoding-> Right-to-Left Document: or via right-clicking directly on the page itself. See image below:

Hope this helps,

Nick Achmon,
Software Development Engineer in Test

Feeds Plus: An Intern Adventure

rss — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:41:00 GMT

Last summer, we had a couple of interns on the RSS team here in IE: Nate Furtwangler, a developer intern, and Chrix Finne, a Program Manager intern. Nate and Chrix both did an amazing job helping us to ship IE7 and Vista, and they also found the time to knock out a really cool project. Here's a big thanks from all of us to them.

I'll let Chrix describe the project (and their experience) in his own words. In case you're wondering, the "where's Sean's office" thing is a reference to Chrix's decision that it would be fun to relocate my office to the roof of the parking garage while I was on vacation. Good times.

- Sean

Hi! My name is Chrix Finne and this past summer I was an intern Program Manager on the IE RSS Team – also known as ‘Team RSS got new digs so the interns got a window office.’ I had the privilege of working on several cool projects this past summer, and had a blast while doing it. Shoutout to my officemate Nate Furtwangler, developer intern and my partner in crime. Though they consumed far fewer Swedish Fish than Nate and I, my mentor Jane “where’s Sean’s office?” Kim and my manager Sean “Romulus” Lyndersay were also awesome and kept me on my toes. Congrats to the whole team on IE7 and Vista RTM!

We are proud to announce that our intern project, Feeds Plus also shipped! It’s a free IE7 add-on that adds two features to the Windows Feeds experience: aggregation and notification. We hope that Feeds Plus will help users get more flexibility and engagement with feeds in Windows.

Feeds Plus, running in the background, can combine multiple feeds into a single, river of news-style feed. All the user has to do is turn on Feeds Plus’ aggregator, and every folder of feeds will sprout an aggregate feed at the top. This can be very useful – for instance, I can make a folder with all of my news feeds and then read all my news at once through the News’ aggregate feed. Read/unread information is synced between the aggregate feed and its children, and aggregate feeds are searchable just like any other feed. If multiple feeds use Simple List Extensions (SLE) then the corresponding aggregate feed will as well – this is cool because you can combine multiple different eBay feeds, and use SLE to sort by price across all of them.

A pop-up feed notification reminiscent of Outlook’s is the second feature in Feeds Plus. The Windows Feed Download Engine always runs in the background, so users have to check to see if new items have arrived. With Feeds Plus, the user can choose which feeds matter most to them and get a pop-up ‘toast’ as soon as those feeds have new items waiting. The pop-up is designed to be unobtrusive—it fades in and out and won’t go crazy and flash every half second—and it includes a handy link to the feeds that it’s announcing:

Feeds Plus is an unsupported IE7 add-on (meaning that it’s not supported by Microsoft technical support or by the IE development team). One important note is that it does not have accessibility support in this release. Don't use it if you're uncomfortable using unsupported software.

Download Feeds Plus here.

So, that’s Feeds Plus. I also had the chance to help design the Feed Headlines gadget on the Windows Vista Sidebar. Feed Headlines shows the user a scrolling list of headlines from one or many feeds with a nice little preview window and links to the browser. It’s a great way to keep content handy – I keep an instance pointed at Engadget that I use to procrastinate all the time.

My favorite thing about Feed technology in Windows is how much freedom it gives the user to choose how, when, and where to consume different types of web content – from news feeds to Craigslist searches. I think that it’s critical to provide different ways to read and consume the feed content that’s coming in, so I hope you enjoy these little feeds extras.

Yours,

Chrix Finne

PS – One shameless plug: Nate and I were lucky enough to get interviewed by Channel 9, so if you want to see those Swedish Fish for real, keep an eye on Channel 9 (hint: they have a feed). They’re on the middle shelf above the demo laptop.

Windows Vista and Feeds

rss — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:01:00 GMT

As noted pretty much everywhere on the web, Windows Vista launched (for businesses) last week.

Windows Vista includes IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform, and is therefore the first Windows operating system to ship with built-in support for RSS (and the first OS of any kind to have RSS support built-in as a native platform component).

Windows Vista is, in fact, the fulfilment of a promise we made over a year ago at Gnomedex 5.0: Longhorn loves RSS.

In addition to the reading experience in IE7, and the platform features, Windows Vista also include the new Windows Sidebar, which ships with a Feed Headlines gadget.

The team that built the gadget have written up a great post on how the gadget was built, and how they leveraged the RSS platform to make development much easier for themselves.

Read their post here: Building the Feed Headlines Gadget.

In case you haven't seen the gadget in action, the screenshot below shows the gadget after the user has clicked on a headline (I've configured it to show the headlines from the MSNBC News feed).

Many thanks to the folks on the Sidebar team that developed such a great gadget, as well as to Chrix Finne, who interned on the IE RSS team as a PM this past summer, and helped out the Sidebar team with feature design for this gadget.

- Sean

Note: Apologies to readers who downloaded an earlier version of this post, which used a photograph taken by Niall Kennedy and posted on flickr.com. He did not appreciate the usage, and replaced it with a different image. I forgot to include an attribution, which I had fully intended to do, but for which I apologise to him.

Saving and loading feed lists in IE7 using OPML

rss — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 21:34:32 GMT

One question we get asked occasionally is:

How do I back up my feed list?

Well, it turns out that there is a standard way to save a feed list in a single file for backup or other purposes. It's called OPML, and IE7 supports importing and exporting feed lists via OPML.

Here is the step-by-step process for backing up your feed list to an OPML file in IE7:

Click on the Add button (the star and plus button next to the Favorites Center button -- Alt-Z is the keyboard shortcut).
Click on Import and Export in the menu.
In the wizard, select Export Feeds from the list of options and click Next.
Select where you'd like the file to be put (by default, it's called feeds.opml, in your Documents folder)
Finish up the wizard.

The OPML file generated will contain your entire feedlist, including any folders you may have created. Simply repeat the process (selecting Import Feeds) to restore a feed list.

As I noted above, OPML is the standard way to save a feed list, and it's supported by pretty much every aggregator out there. You can use the steps above to save your feed list to use in another aggregator or to import a feed list created by another aggregator.

Since IE7 uses the RSS platform, you can also use this technique to import or export lists of feeds from and to any application that uses the RSS platform.

Oh, and by the way -- IE7 is coming this month.

Sean

Securing feed enclosures

rss — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 01:25:00 GMT

Greetings,

I am one of the developers on the RSS team, and to complement Sean’s and Walter’s recent postings on feed security, I would like to talk about one topic that didn’t get as much attention in recent discussions on feed security as perhaps it should have - feed enclosures. Enclosures are files “attached” to feed items, commonly used in podcasting and often automatically downloaded to user’s machine by aggregators.

In IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform, we have taken a number of precautions to protect users and developers against feeds which may attempt to use enclosures in malicious ways.

To begin with, when a user subscribes to a feed in IE7 enclosure downloads are turned off by default. Users can easily opt-in to enclosure downloads via the feed properties.

We also treat enclosures as inherently un-trusted files – in many ways similar to email attachments. We decided not to permit directly-executable (i.e. any file that would execute arbitrary code when double-clicked) or other dangerous files to be downloaded as feed enclosures (there are no common scenarios that require this today, and if it is absolutely necessary, it is possible to wrap an executable file in another format, so that it is no longer directly executable). For this we use the most flexible mechanism possible, the Attachment Execution Service (AES). In simple terms, the AES maintains a list of file extensions that are considered dangerous, including the directly-executable file types, which the RSS platform consults to decide whether or not to block a file.

Besides blocking the dangerous file types, AES also has a mechanism which allows security programs, such as anti-virus or anti-spyware, to integrate with it, allowing them to inspect files before we make them available to developers or users. Windows Defender has implemented this integration, so on Windows Vista (or if the user has installed Windows Defender on Windows XP), the user will gain that additional level of protection from the malicious files.

IE also has a mechanism to block file downloads on a per-zone basis, so before fetching the enclosure we also verify that downloads are allowed for the URL. You can find this per-zone setting in your Internet Options, under Security tab. The simplest way to prevent enclosure downloads from a site is to add it to the Restricted Zone, where downloads are disabled by default.

If an enclosure download does get blocked for security reasons, this is reported in the feed view as well as through the RSS platform’s LastDownloadError property.

Downloaded enclosures are stored in a subfolder of the Temporary Internet Files folder. The full path to the enclosures is different on every machine, preventing malicious feeds or other malicious code from using enclosure downloads as a vector to get known files on the system, as well as ensuring that other applications don’t unknowingly access enclosure files. If an application wants access to the downloaded enclosures it needs to obtain the path from the RSS platform.

To summarize: enclosures are treated as un-trusted files, and the following security mitigations are used:

Enclosure download is off by-default for all feeds.
Directly-executable files are blocked from being downloaded, using the Windows Attachment Execution Service (AES).
Anti-virus and Anti-spyware applications (like Windows Defender) can integrate with AES to dynamically block malicious files.
Files are stored in a variable location on each PC, ensuring that applications must opt-in to consuming the enclosures.

As before, we want to make sure all aggregator developers know that the tools we are using to make IE and the RSS platform more secure are available for their use as well:

AES can be utilized through the IAttachmentExecute interface.
To determine if file downloads are allowed, applications can invoke the ProcessUrlAction method to query for URLACTION_SHELL_FILE_DOWNLOAD.

Once again, we would like to reiterate our commitment to working with the community to improve feed security, and as always we are open for your feedback and questions.

Thank you,

Miladin

Update 9/25/2006: Added a summary paragraph for clarity

More on Feed Security

rss — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 03:31:00 GMT

Shortly after the SPI Dynamics presentation that sparked a renewed discussion on feed security in the community last month, James Snell developed a suite of tests (based on an earlier set by James Holderness), and generously made them available quietly to aggregator developers. He has now made the tests public.

I contacted James last month (via email as he requested) and he pointed me to the test suite, so we could test them against our own security mitigations. We have done full test passes using his test suite.

The result: IE7 passed all of the tests (which means that no script from the feeds executed successfully in IE, and that developers using the RSS platform would not have been vulnerable to the class of attacks in the tests). This confirms SPI Dynamic's findings that IE7 was not vulnerable to the attacks described in their paper.

I thought it might be useful to use this opportunity to talk about our commitment to security, the defense-in-depth strategy that we have taken, and how other aggregator developers might benefit from the work we have done.

Our commitment to security

To put it bluntly, we are keenly aware that IE is a target for security researchers and hackers. We know we cannot afford to be lax in how we approach security. It has therefore been our #1 guiding principle that we would aim for a secure experience first -- sacrificing functionality, if necessary, to achieve it.

Long-time readers may remember this post from last November, in which we announced that we would only support well-formed XML in feeds -- the post was the direct result of a long internal discussion about ways to securely handle malicious feeds. Refusing to handle malformed XML eliminates a large class of potential attacks.

Walter posted last month on the details of how IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform protect users and developers from script in feeds. To summarize what he wrote, IE7 employs a (roughly) two-level defense-in-depth strategy:

Sanitization: First, the Windows RSS Platform uses several techniques to strip out script (and several other variations of malicious HTML) before storing the feed content.
Restricted Feed View: Second, just in case the first step misses something, IE's feed view uses a variation on the Restricted Zone to show a feed, meaning that no script in a feed will run, even if made it through the previous step.

Each of the two defense-in-depth steps described above require a significant amount of code and investment, but security has been always important enough to us that they where the first major pieces of development that we did when we began implementing the RSS features. In fact, these security features have been in place since the first public release of the IE7 RSS platform features last February.

To give you a sense of what is involved -- at one point in development, the sanitization code accounted for fully one-third of all the code in the RSS platform. The code takes lessons from similar libraries used for years to clean the billions of messages that Hotmail receives, and used for a number of releases in various parts of Office. It includes a number of feed-specific additions (for example, if an element is supposed to only contain text, then we can remove all HTML, not just the script). We validate and sanitize every documented element in each format we support, as well as a set of common RSS extensions. This is all done before an item is ever stored on the system.

In IE itself, the "restricted feed view" was also a significant challenge because of the interactive nature of a feed view. We designed and developed a feed view that required no javascript for the various controls (subscribing, filtering, sorting, or searching) to work. In fact, the IE7 feed view implementation is effectively that described by Nick Bradbury in his recent post on feed security (using a script-less page, and manipulating the view from the hosting code).

The bottom line is that IE takes security very seriously. We have invested a great deal of time in hardening IE7 across the board, and nowhere more seriously than in our RSS features. It is an ongoing process, however, and we deeply appreciate the efforts of those in the community who have developed additional security tests and allowed us to use them.

Looking forward

We also look forward to continuing to work with the community to improve the security of all aggregators. To that end, we want to make a couple offers to developers of Windows aggregator developers:

First, you should feel free to contact us if you have questions that come up while implementing a fully restricted feed view using the techniques that Nick talked about in his post. If there is enough demand, we may write a blog post on how the IE feed view is built, so people can learn from what we’ve done.
Second, the Feeds API includes a utility function called Normalize(), which can be used to gain access to the platform's HTML sanitization code. Contact us if you'd like more information on how you could use this to supplement your own sanitization code.
Finally, I’ll make the obvious point that the entire platform is available for your use, including not just the security features described here, but storage and a suite of bandwidth management features. I understand, of course, that for many existing aggregator developers, switching storage and download engines may be too significant a change in their applications, but I do want to encourage developers of new applications to consider it.

Thanks for reading,
Sean

PS. Of course, there will be some readers who see this post as a challenge and start looking for exploits in IE's RSS features. If you do find any, please let us know! :) We know that no security is perfect, and that it is an on-going process.

Script in Feeds

rss — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:31:00 GMT

You might have read the c|net article "Blog feeds may carry security risk" which summarizes the presentation given by Robert Auger ~~and Caleb Sima~~ of SPI Dynamics. The presentation points to potential dangers of malicious script embedded in feeds. This has sparked some discussion in the community.

We think it's good for the RSS community and users that the potential dangers of malicious script in feeds are pointed out and thereby can be addressed by application developers before any attacks materialize.

In IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform we've implemented several mitigations that specifically address potentially malicious scripts in feeds:

Sanitization
When downloading feeds, the RSS Platform passes the feed through a sanitization process which among other things removes script from HTML fields like the description element. Also, text fields, like the title element, are treated as text and not as HTML, so HTML tags are entity encoded. These steps are performed before the feed content is accessible by application including IE7's Feed View. Further, the feed content is persisted in the Feed Store in the sanitized form, so that applications accessing the feed data benefit from the sanitization.

Feed View in Restricted zone
The IE7 Feed View displays feeds in the Restricted security zone, no matter where the feed originated, even if for example the feed came from a site in the Trusted Sites zone. By default script is disabled in the Restricted zone. In addition, the Feed View disallows URL Actions including script and active content.

We designed and implemented the RSS features using the principles of the Secure Development Lifecycle as embraced by Microsoft. One of the principles is defense in depth. The idea being, even if script somehow were to sneak by the first layer of defense, the impact that the script could have is restricted, if not entirely negated.

Hosting IE in Applications
The second mitigation above can be of interest to application developers who are hosting MSHTML inside their applications. When using MSHTML to render feeds, we recommend that the host application implements a custom security manager, which allows the application to control which URL Actions are permissible. In order to reduce the attack surface of the application it is advisable to limit the permissible URL Actions to the smallest number possible.

I hope this will spark even more discussion about security and RSS which will ultimately benefit users.

- Walter vonKoch

[Update 8/16] Peter Plamondon of SPI Dynamics provided the link to the paper itself in the comments.

[Update 8/17] As noted by Sean Kerner in the comments, the presentation was given by Bob Auger solo. I've correct the intro above. Thanks.

Read Feeds with Ease in Beta 3

rss — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 19:33:00 GMT

IE7 Beta 3 is here! We’ve snuck in some goodies in the feed reading user experience based on your Beta 2 feedback (keep the comments coming!). We are feature-complete for feed reading in IE7, but we’re still looking for feedback to make tweaks and fixes for the final release. If you run into issues with Beta 3, don’t hesitate in sending us your feedback. Here are some of improvements since Beta 3.

Refresh All Feeds – Throughout the day, the download engine is refreshing your feeds. However, when you’re ready to plow through all of your feeds, you probably want to make sure all of your feeds have the absolute latest info. This is feedback we’ve gotten from several beta users:

Airex: Nice Feature, but how can I, for example, refresh all subscriptions in OneClick?

TravisP: The feeds section definitely requires a sync or refresh function for the entire tree. I have over 50 feeds in my tree that requires each one to be right clicked on and refreshed.

Gert Van Waelvelde: I think a "check all feeds now" button would be very useful. When I turn on my computer I like to get all the latest news and latest blog posts immediately, rather than having to wait until the feeds are synchronized automatically. Also, when I'm about to turn my computer off, I like to know whether there are any new news items or blog posts that I should read urgently. A "check all feeds now" button would make this possible.

We’ve added a way for you to refresh all the feeds from the context menu from any feed or folder in the Feed List Pane.

Control Marking a Feed as Read – The feed reading model in IE is light-weight, and when you select a feed to read, the entire feed is automatically marked as read. However, there’s a case where you open up a feed to read and realize that you don’t have time to finish reading all the unread items. Wouldn’t it be nice to save the current feed reading state?

Roger Bonine: There doesn't seem to be any way to set read/unread info, either at the individual post level or the feed level. For instance, if I look at a feed and it only has two posts, I may scroll through the feed and read them both. Then I would mark the entire feed as read. Is this really not possible, or am I missing something?

Matt Ellis: I think the viewed model makes sense for the IE user - it's the least interaction, and it's the majority case that the user will want to mark all items as read when they view the page. The problem arises when I use the common feed from a more traditional aggregator where I have more fine grained control over my feed items. If I happen to browse to my feed in IE, IE will trounce over all my settings in my aggregator.

Now you can. We’ve made 2 improvements to control how you mark a feed as read. For feeds that have unread items, there’s a new control that appears “Mark feed as read.”

If a feed has this control checked, when you navigate away from the feed (open a new link within the same tab, close the tab, etc.) the feed is marked as read. To keep the current feed items in the unread state, just uncheck this control.

If you prefer to keep to manage when to mark a feed as read, you can change the default setting of this control through the Feed Settings dialog (Tools | Internet Options > Content > Feed Settings button) so that the “Mark feed as read” control is always unchecked.

Keyboard Shortcuts – In the past, we haven’t made it very easy to discover the keyboards shortcuts. Aaron’s posted some useful keyboard shortcuts for IE7, and we’ve added them in the tooltip for the top-level buttons on the frame in Beta 3. Here are the ones that we’ve added for Feed Reading:

Alt + J for Feed Discovery Button – Opens the menu of the discovered feeds on a webpage
Ctrl + J for Feed List Pane – Opens the Feed List Pane in the Favorites Center in a menu mode
Ctrl + Shift + J for Feed List Pane – Opens the Feed List Pane in the Favorites Center in the docked mode
Alt + S for Text Search – Puts the focus in the search box in the Feed Reading View
Alt + I for All Items – Displays all of the feed items in the Feed Reading View
Alt + M for Mark as Read – Toggles the Mark as Read control in the Feed Reading View

Here’s a pattern to go through all of your unread feeds:

Ctrl + J to open the Feed List Pane
Down arrow to find the next unread feed (a feed is bolded if there are unread items), Right arrow to expand a folder, and Enter to select a feed to read
Space to scroll through the feed to the end. By default, we filter the Feed Reading View to unread items unless it is a list feed.
Repeat steps 1 & 2 to get to the next unread feed

We hope you enjoy these improvements! We look forward to hearing what you think.

- Jane

Niall Kennedy, Feed Platforms, and Services

rss — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 11:17:00 GMT

I, for one, am very excited to have Niall Kennedy join the Windows Live team and drive the development of an RSS platform.

For one thing, it's great to have someone with a voice that is as well-respected as his joining Microsoft in any capacity. Just last month, at Etech, Jane Kim joined Niall onstage for his session on Feeds as a platform, where she talked about the principles behind why we are building a shared central platform for feed syndication into Windows. It was clear then (and from his excellent writeups on the topic) that he deeply understood the value of feed platforms.

More generally, it is great to have Windows Live focusing on building an online RSS platform. I have long believed that integration between online services and clients enables far richer experiences than either one alone (in fact, a key goal of our own Windows RSS platform is to make it super-easy for a client developer to integrate online content and services into their application).

On a related topic, I will go out on a limb and say that I can be a bit of a NewsGator fanboy. I've been a NewsGator ~~Outlook Edition~~ Inbox user for years (though these days, I admit, I feel compelled to use IE7's feed reader :) The synchronization support between the RSS platform and NewsGator Online that Greg showed off at Mix06 is just awesome. Greg and the NewsGator team demonstrate exactly what I love about integration between clients and services combining to deliver a great service that makes them both that much better.

In short, there is no end to the cool things that services enable, both the Windows Live ones and the ones done by folks like Greg and his team.

Sean

Simple List Extensions in action

rss — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:25:00 GMT

Last summer, at Gnomedex 5.0, we announced the Simple List Extensions (SLE), which allow RSS and Atom feeds to be marked up with new tags that allow sorting/filtering and what we call "list semantics." There’s been a lot of feedback from the community and the specification has been updated and posted to a permanent location on MSDN.

At Mix06 last week, Dean Hachamovitch gave the keynote address on Next Generating Browsing, during which he showed off great live examples of feeds that implement the Simple List Extensions, built by Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and MSN Spaces.

Amazon
The Amazon Web Services team did some great work in setting up RSS feeds for wishlists. Just go to amazon.com, find anyone’s wishlist and click on the fancy orange icon at the top of the page.

Here’s a live example, and a video from Mix06 showing these feeds in action. Jeff Barr posts more details over on the Amazon Web Services blog.

eBay
In addition to the feeds from eBay stores that they've had for a few months, eBay is now providing RSS feeds on search results (Arturo Zacarias posted the details on the eBay announcements list).

The search results and the existing store feeds are SLE-enhanced to allow very granular filtering on different categories and filters. This is one of the best examples to date of using the sorting and filtering to their fullest.

Pick an item you've been trying to find and just type it into the search box on ebay.com and subscribe to the feed using the button at the bottom of the page.

Yahoo! Music
Yahoo! Music has been providing RSS feeds for their Top Songs, Albums and Videos for some time. Now these feeds are enhanced with SLE to provide sorting and filtering controls, as well as to indicating that these feeds are really lists. SLE-supporting aggregators will treat these kinds of feeds in the way that the publisher intended – as a single entity. We’ll post later today about how exactly this "list semantic" works.

Here’s a direct link to the Yahoo! Music Top 10 Songs list. Ian Rogers posts more on the Yahoo! Music blog.

MSN Spaces
The folks over at MSN Spaces quietly added SLE support to all of their feeds earlier this month. Mike Torres blogged about what they've done. Here’s an example using his feed. This really shows how SLE can be used to enhance even blog feeds.

Needless to say, I’m very excited to see RSS used in these cool ways on sites as diverse as these, and I'm even more excited to see SLE being used to make these feeds even more useful to users.

On a related note, SLE has been getting some other mentions around the blogosphere. Charlie Wood predicts: “As more enterprise applications become RSS-enabled, I predict that an RSS reader that doesn't support Simple List Extensions will become as retrograde as a web browser that doesn't support tables.” I have to say that I agree completely :).

There’s no better way to find out how these Simple List Extensions work than to install IE 7 Beta 2 Preview (updated March 20 – check out the cleaner feed view!), and just click on the examples above. They all show off the sorting and filtering features of SLE amazingly well.

Thanks to everyone involved in getting these feeds online!
- Sean

RSS at Mix06

rss — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 10:06:00 GMT

A quick plug for Mix06 - it's coming up fast (Mar 20-22), so get registered quickly.

In case you missed it, Mix06 is a conference that’s focused on Internet technologies so, not surprisingly, RSS will be there in force, with a bunch of sessions that feature RSS fairly prominently.

We'll have a session on the Windows RSS Platform, and you’ll see aspects of the platform show up in several other sessions and keynotes.

The Channel9 team is doing a series of videocasts on the Mix sessions. Check them out.

Members of the RSS team will be there for the entire time, so if you’re planning on being there and you’d like chat, drop us a line. It’s in Las Vegas, so how can it not be fun?

- Sean

Part 2: Discover and Subscribe to Feeds

rss — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 22:22:00 GMT

To get started with feed reading experience in IE7, you need to first find a feed and then subscribe to it. This post covers how to do just that.

Discover

We expect most users to encounter a feed through the Feed Discovery button located on the Command Bar.

A website can advertise that it has one or more feeds available. If a feed isn’t available, then the button is disabled. We had this functionality in Beta 1, but it’s gone through a makeover. First off, we’re using a new icon :). Second, the default action of the button goes to first discovered feed. If there are other multiple feeds discovered, press the drop down to see the menu of all of the discovered feeds. We noticed that many websites only have one feed so we wanted to optimize the experience for that case (1 less click!).

We’ve been asked why the button takes the user to the Feed Reading Page instead of directly subscribing to the feed. We think that in most cases, the user previews the feed to see if the content is appealing before subscribing to it. That said, we are still flirting with the idea of adding this for the power-users out there.

If you are a publisher, and you want to enable feed discovery when a user visits your website, read the publisher's guide for the details. If you have followed these intructions, but the button isn't lighting up, report your website here.

Subscribe

There are two modes to the Feed Reading page: preview and subscribed mode. In preview mode, you see the feed that is live on the website. This is a pretty static experience. By subscribing to the feed, IE7 automatically checks the website (even if IE7 isn’t running) to see if there are new updates on a scheduled basis – for instance, IE7 can check every 4 hours to see if there is new content available for the msnbc.com feed. If IE7 finds that there is new content, IE7 automatically downloads the new content, and it is available for your reading in the Feed Reading page.

All subscribed feeds are added to the feed list, located in the Favorites Center. It is in the upper left corner of the frame. Feeds that have new content available are bolded, and bolded folders contain a feed with new content. Notice that my “friends” folder isn’t bolded. I know not to check any of my friends’ blog because there’s nothing new to read since the last time I visited.

Have we gone crazy with the feed icon? Maybe. We threw in the feed icon in the feed list for kicks, and after using it for a while, we all started warming up to it.

If you are already an experienced feed reader, you can import your OPML file (a file format that can represent your feeds hierarchically) from Bloglines, FeedDemon, Live.com, etc. Just click on the “+” button next to the Favorites Center icon and select “Import and Export.” This takes you through a wizard to add feeds from your OPML file into IE7.

Once you successfully discover and subscribe to a feed, you are ready to start reading.

Part 3: Read and Manage

- Jane

Part 1: Hello feeds

rss — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Jane. Everyone I know spends their free time browsing the internet… whether it’s catching up on the news, reading friends’ blog, or looking for that perfect web deal, book, person. But scanning a site to see what you’ve read versus what’s new can be tiring. And it’s frustrating to find that there’s nothing new to read after all that work. With the IE7 Beta 2 Preview, we added a convenient way interacting with the internet: Subscribing to feeds.

Feeds are a different format of the website’s content that allows software to determine if there is something new available. It can range from a new article on msnbc.com, a new movie release on Netflix, or a new journal entry on a friend’s blog. With IE7 Beta 2 Preview, you can subscribe to your favorite websites’ feed and read new updates directly in the browser.

1. Feed Discovery Button – The Feed Discovery button tells you if there is a feed detected on the webpage you’re looking at. It lives on the Command Bar and lights up when a feed is found. Clicking on it takes you to the Feed Reading Page.

2. Feed Reading Page – This is the view of the feed for reading. When you subscribe to a feed, you can determine the new content versus the content that you’ve seen before. We also have controls for inline search, sorting, and filtering to quickly get to the content that is interesting to you.

3. Feed list – The list of feeds that are you subscribed sits next to your favorites. A feed is bold if there is new content available for you.

There are 4 parts to the feed reading experience: discovering, subscribing, reading, and managing. If you want to find more, read the next two posts.

Part 2: Discovery and Subscribe

Part 3: Read and Manage

- Jane

Feeds and well-formed XML

rss — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 20:41:00 GMT

Here in Windows, we’re working hard on Windows Vista Beta 2, and we've recently been doing some work on how we parse feeds.

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.

This principle allows us to build a more predictable feed parser. As a platform, it's important that applications using the platform to consume feeds can rely on the fact that the platform will always be providing information in the way that the publisher intended (trying to guess what a publisher meant to do when there is an error in a feed can be tricky, at best). We also spoke to several people in the RSS and developer community at Gnomedex and at PDC, and they wholeheartedly supported this.

When viewing a feed that doesn’t validate as correct XML, IE7 will flag it (and highlight the error, just like we do today for generically bad XML feeds – so feed publishers can see what’s going on). When the platform downloads a feed with errors during regular updates, it will discard that update, and will try again at the next scheduled download (so feeds with temporary errors won't be permanently affected).

That said, we do recognize that there is a great deal of variance in the actual content of RSS feeds, so we’ll be more liberal when it comes to what elements are required in a feed. We will post on exactly how we're handling different feeds in a future post.

- Sean

The orange icon...

rss — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 08:32:00 GMT

It’s great that a discussion of icons has recently restarted in the RSS community. We are in the process of figuring out what icon to use on our toolbar in IE7 to represent feeds.

There are five parts of the experience for feeds in IE7: discovering if a webpage has a feed, previewing the feed, subscribing to the feed to get continual notifications of new items, managing the list of the subscribed feeds, and reading the feed contents. The icon in this post is for the first two parts which shipped in Beta 1. The icon is visible in the IE7 frame to indicate the presence of a feed for the current webpage. Clicking on the feed icon takes the user to readable preview of the feed from which the user can subscribe to it.

The choice of what icon to use is challenging because it should be universally symbolic, but today there is no single icon for that represents feed. Instead there’s a variety of mostly orange rectangles with the words “XML”, “RSS”, “ATOM”, “FEED”, or “Subscribe.”

Our goal is to make sure that the icon is something that is understandable by all of our users: novice, advanced, developer, business, international, etc. These are the principles that we are using when selecting an icon:

It conveys the important attributes of feeds: newness, activity, subscription, and continual information.
It builds on the most consistent and identifiable element used to represent feeds today: the orange rectangle.
It avoids the use of text. Icons that have text do not generally work well for a global audience. For example, an icon with the text “FEED” may be cryptic to users whose primary language is non-Latin based. Text is very important to support an icon (in tool-tips or accompanying text). In English, we will be using the verb “subscribe” fairly widely whenever text is appropriate.

We took a look at the prevalent icons used today but none of them fit our principles. The Firefox icon is close, but it lacks the rectangular dimension (principle #2). Here are some of the ideas that we’ve been playing around with:

    1 – We use a variation of the gleam to convey that feeds are updatable.


    2 – The ring illustrates movement around a feed.


    3 – This is a spark to show new information being broadcasted.


    4 – We use waves to show broadcasting of content.


    5 – This is the Beta 1 icon with our new requirements.


We have a couple of weeks to get the final design. Please leave comments with any feedback or links to other good ideas!

- jane

Update 12/16: A decision was made. Check it out here. Thanks for all the comments.