The normalized XML that you're seeing in View Source is also accessible from the feed APIs, so the XML we generate is a format we expect to support in perpetuity.
It's designed to be a relatively simple format that application developers can rely on in the same way that they rely on APIs in the object model, so we map all common elements from other formats into RSS 2.0 (the basis for our native format). Why RSS 2.0? Because it's the format used by the majority of feeds on the web. Since this is an internal format between the platform and its clients, it theoretically doesn't matter what we chose as long as there's no data loss (and as long as we document it -- which we're in the process of doing). In the Atom case, in particular, we occasionally need to bring Atom elements through as RSS 2.0 extensions. Any case of data-loss is a bug that we'll address (that's the point of a Beta :). If you have cases of sites where there is data-loss, you can either send it me, send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or post to the feedback wiki where we're tracking feeds that we're not handling correctly [1]. I'm in the process of publishing the documentation for how the Windows RSS Platform handles each feed format on our blog [2]. If someone does have a particularly complex Atom feed, we'd love to use it for our own testing to make sure we're handling all of the Atom-specific data correctly, so just send me a link. As a general statement, if you have question about what IE7/Windows is or is not doing with feeds, just drop me a line. Thanks, Sean [1] http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerFeedIssues [2] http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Powell Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 7:29 AM To: A. Pagaltzis Cc: Atom Syntax Subject: Re: Fwd: [rss-public] Microsoft Feeds API Enclosure Test Thursday, February 23, 2006, 6:37:50 AM, you wrote: > Does someone who has access to an MSFT system care to take a look at > this? I have been playing with IE7, and it is interesting to see what happens when you click on a feed and "view source". If the feed hasn't been subscribed to, you just see the feed source as you would expect. If you have subscribed to the feed however, you see Windows's internal representation of the feed, which is normalised to a sort of RSS2++. I assume that this is what is exposed when you use the APIs to access the XML. (Hmm - giving access to the XML in this way is a brave move, XML has a huge surface area for an API, practically any change to the XML produced by Windows could break client applications, and I didn't find any documentation for the normalised RSS2++ ). What is interesting is that Atom is handled (reasonably well), by converting the Atom to RSS2. The logic seems to replace atom elements with there RSS2 equivalents and the loss in fidelity is not too great (eg atom:updated -> pubDate), and to leave the Atom as-is for awkward (eg: [EMAIL PROTECTED]/xml) There is definitely some loss in fidelity though. It would be nice to run an extreme Atom feed through the process to see what gets lost. xml:base appears to get corrupted, and unless the API provides access to the baseURI of each entry there is a risk of data loss (as the xml:base at feed level may change between polls it therefore needs to be preserved with each entry.) Does anyone have a bad-ass atom feed with IRIs, binary content, atom:source, xml:base, xml:lang, extensions etc for testing? -- Dave
