soledad penadés

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Just meditating about the new event which has just hit us recently, the announcement of Microsoft not only providing integrated support for RSS inside the long-awaited-surrounded-by-rumours Longhorn, but also creating a new feature for RSS2.0 - lists - and releasing it as an extension, and even more, under a Creative Commons License. (They announced it at gnomedex2005, see blogs for it on technorati, there are lots of posts!)

I have tried to remain objective and to avoid negative prejudices against Microsoft, but the thing is that their decission produces me a mix of scare and joy at the same time. As all of the people which Scobleizer recopilated in this post. People is against and also in favour of Microsoft entering the wonderful RSS world.

For me, I don't really know what to say. I have tried to understand what they really want to do but searching here and there all I can get are discussions and rantings about Microsoft wanting to eat the whole RSS market, the bloggers, the independent RSS readers software and so on. Something like: If RSS was a piece of cake, Microsoft will eat it!

So, it's good to see Microsoft accepting RSS and not creating their subscription format for any type of content-provider. That's really cool, instead of developing a new format, they try to be standard, for once… or not? this is what worries me: is their proposed extension (the lists) going to break all the rss readers out there, or will it work seamlessly with them, not breaking anything and maintaining a normal behaviour?

In fact, the idea of extending RSS into a more generic/powerful specification which allows one to keep track of more things with more meaning, it's not so bad. As they say, all of us use lists in our daily tasks. Buuuut, which is the meaning of RSS? Really Simple Syndication. That makes me think that… shouldn't it be maintained like that…? simple? (and remind that cool sentence: Keep It Simple, Stupid!)

This can have some effect over the all the content providers and specifically over the websites. Now they need to provide really good content, because with this scenario what really means is it, not a fancy presentation. Also they will need to generate syntactically correct XML (which will derive into including syntactically correct (X)HTML, which is absolutely great) otherwise the parser will show a big ERROR.

And that relates to another thing that worries me: the kind of parser they are going to include inside Longhorn. Are they going to embed a parser which tolerates lots of errors thus making some rss feeds only viewable by longhorn based rss readers? This could lead us to a situation like IE only sites, we will have longhorn-only feeds (or IE only feeds, as they say RSS reading will be possible in the new Internet Explorer 7) because of people creating messy feeds which only test on Longhorn products. That's disgusting. One of the features I like more of feeds is that they are multiplatform, and I am not restricted to any specific platform to read them. I can use an online reader like bloglines, or offline ones like for example Sage for firefox, or even thunderbird (and I am not sure but I would say that Firefox also allows to read RSS as live bookmarks). As Nick Finck says: 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 backwards (MS DOM, MS extentions to (x)HTML and CSS, and now extentions to RSS)? …

And more worries: the license about this. They say they are going to release it under a Creative Commons license. I hope they maintain it like that. And I also hope that they don't go evil and try to get the patent for some hidden detail of the implementation in a way that for using their rss lists or something derivated from it (for example, cross-listing two feeds) you have to pay. That would get a big disapproval from myself (and more people too, specially with all this horrible nightmare about software patents).

Finally what I don't like at all but seems to be the crude reality: microsoft tried it with Active Desktop and those stupid channels which weren't really useful at all. Now it has been waiting for years in the dark, until they have chosen their victim (rss), then they will take profit of all the efforts (standardization, diffusion of the format, testing, addictiveness) that people have put in it and will use it for their own profit, while atom semi-dies of starvation, while saying that they are bringing RSS to the masses. Oh!, many thanks for showing RSS to windows longhorn users!

Hale, algún día había que devolverle el testigo a la señorita Madieta. A ver si de rebote se anima y escribe algo en su blog, jejeje. Allá voy!!

1 - Al azar, 10 álbums de mi colección:

INXS - Welcome to wherever you are
Kylie Minogue - Enjoy yourself
Wojciech Kilar - Bram Stoker's Dracula Ost
Belle and Sebastian -
Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant
Astrud - Mi fracaso personal
Air - Talkie Walkie
Beatles - the white album
Depeche Mode - Songs of faith and devotion
Kindergarten - Kindergarten

2 - Discos que me da vergüenza encontrar, buscando la respuesta del punto anterior:

Supongo que los de Take that, new kids on the block o algo así, pero al final acaban molándome las melodías chorras cuando los vuelvo a oír :)

3 - ¿Qué cantidad total de música bajada hay en tu ordenador?

No sabria hacer una estimacion, entre lo que me bajo y me quedo y lo que me bajo y borro… :D

4 - ¿Último cd que compraste?
mmmm… omm…. uhmmm…. ¿cuál era?… diría que el de marlango…

5 - ¿Cuál es la última canción que has oido antes de leer este post?
Astrud - La boda XDDDD

6 - Canciones que escuchas mucho o significan mucho para tí:
muchas… pero allá voy… inxs - hear that sound, inxs - strange desire, beatles - get back, beatles - penny lane, belle & sebastian - waiting for the moon to rise, ed harcourt - from every sphere, peter schilling - terra titanic, new order - bizarre love triangle, la buena vida - hhmmss, josh wink - higher state of consciusness, way out west - killa

7 - Cinco personas a quien pasaré este test y por qué:
A los zonaneutros con blog (drumu, pere, silenci y madgoblin) y a trace, para que se estresen un poco X)

I was using jscalendar in a form. The form is inside a div which is inside another div, etc. Each div had modifiers for position. It was showing nicely on ie, ie mac and firefox, everything as expected.
But when adding the calendar the party started! IE decided to move the calendar to the right. Hum… always on the same position… then after the weekend I have had the magic idea: it was not calculating the final position after all the nested divs. Current position was the one without the margin of the new div. So I assigned position:static to the container div and whops! now the calendar div appears in the right size.
Those oddities in a deadline-stressed mode are nightmares!

Para una vez que se me ocurre ver elpais.es, después de que volviera a abrir parte de sus contenidos al público (sin pasar por taquilla), se me ocurre echarle un vistazo a EP3, y sí, tres, tres ventanas nuevas me ha abierto consecutivamente. La primera tras abrir la página, la segunda al clickar en la portada sobre la imagen que ponía programación del sonar, y la tercera tras volver a clickar en la programación del sónar - porque la primera vez que clickas no vas a donde esperas llegar, sino a otra página con el índice de contenidos. O algo así, tampoco me he molestado en seguir leyendo y cerrando ventanas.
Ahora a pasar otros dos años sin visitar esta web, por pesados.

Estaba yo navegando por ahí tan tranquila y apacible, cuando abrí una página (no voy a decir cuál, no quiero ser acusadora esta vez :P). Estaba usando Safari. Lo primero que me encontré fue un alert de Javascript dándome la bienvenida a la página. Bien vamos, me dije. Luego, unos frames como una casa. Mejorando lo presente, me seguí diciendo. Tras ello, todos los links estaban hechos con javascript, una de esas grandes estupideces que abunda tanto en internet. Sí, para ir a las diferentes páginas utilizaba el famoso <a href="#" onclick="…">, etc, etc.

¡Aquello empezaba a tomar tintes totalmente inaceptables! Pero me dije, calma calma, que no cunda el pánico. Sí, sí, emperatriz. Con tanta parafernalia estúpida, y aparte de la basura del javascript para los enlaces, había como millones de etiquetas sin cerrar, etiquetas montadas unas con las otras (del palo de <b><i></b><font></p>… ay… me estremezco cada vez que lo recuerdo), etc, etc, y el caso es que al final, la página sencillamente no iba. De la primera página no pasaba.

Y mira que nunca escribo a la gente quejándome de que no saben escribir html como es debido y de que su página realmente da lástima (nótese la ironía :P), pero esta vez no sé por qué me decidí a mandarle un mensajito educado, supongo que dado que había anunciado la web en un foro de mac, imaginaba que la habría probado en un mac:

Hola, he estado mirando (o intentandolo) la web ———, llegue
al enlace desde macuarium, pero no puedo pasar de historia, las demas paginas me salen todas en blanco con Safari 2.0.
No lo he probado con mas navegadores porque me da mucha pereza
encender un pc.
Por si te sirve de algo, un saludo.

Y bueno, no me esperaba nada más diferente de lo que recibí:

Muchas gracias por tu mensaje y la información, pero actualmente todas las Webs que se realizan se hacen para que sean vistas en su inmensa mayoria por internet explorer y netscape en todoas sus versiones mas recientes y la verdad es que otros navegadores son muy poco usuales, no obstante esto es como el sistema operativo de microsoft, xp, 98, 200, etc, quien utiliza aun el 95 ó msdos ó simplemente el atari para la creacion musical, todo evoluciona y hay que evolucionar a la vez y si la mayoria trabaja con ciertos programas habar que hacerlo asi, aunque nos pese a algunos y me incluyo en el pack, mucahs gracias y suerte.

En fin, que ahí hay uno que necesita de un lavado de cabeza por la cssecta… ;)