I've not been one to bash Microsoft, however, they're definitely going down the wrong road with their new Internet Explorer Beta 7 (IE7 Beta). With this product they're out to defeat the work of a lot of hard working folks who've spent the time to make RSS feeds readable. Feedburner.com does it and so does Quikonnex.com. What I'm talking about is the use of XSL stylesheets within the RSS feeds so that when you click on one of those orange RSS/XML icons you don't see geeky code. When someone clicks on one of those links on Quikonnex.com, a site that uses Feedburner, and if a user is using my RSSBoss product, they'll be presented with attractive, readable information and with quick subscription links for popular newsreaders. Microsoft doesn't recognize the existing stylesheet in abhorence to all conformance to standards and replaces it with their own style sheet.

Josh Bancroft reports about this in his blog article, IE7 Breaks FeedBurner Custom Feed Styles, Forces Its Own. Michael Randall of PigPog.com commented on this saying "I think they’re ok as they are with this. The FeedBurner custom page is there so that people clicking on an RSS feed in a browser see something that makes sense, rather than the XML code. IE7 is an RSS reader, so it displays the feed as an RSS reader would.

If you point any desktop reader at the feed, it shows you the items in its own way - IE7 is just doing the same as any other RSS reader would. FeedBurner’s work-around for RSS-ignorant browsers isn’t *needed* any more." Michael, what kind of drugs has Microsoft been selling you? IE 7 is RSS enabled, but not an RSS Reader, certainly not an aggregator. The work that I've done and Feedburner Has done recognizes that there's more on the Net than Microsoft. RSS is a subset of XML and when XML calls for a stylesheet to be applied, the browser should recognize this and deliver the information as the author intended. While it is certainly acceptable to render an RSS feed with an embedded style sheet when a stylesheet is not provided, it is not when one is available.

JD at Grain-of-Salt.com hits the nail on the head with his title of his article "IE7 Aiming for RSS Aggregator Dominance?" This is exactly what Microsoft is doing, they've already recaptured the sidebar on their browser, making it difficult for 3rd parties to use that space for their customers, and now they want control over how RSS is rendered and utilized. If you want to live in a world captured by poor creativity, then sign up for AOL and use their captive audience system. I guess you could use the AOL-clone called MSN, but that's what they want anyway. To some, this little venture into distorting RSS for their own gain will be seen as a nice feature and recognition of RSS after many years of being relegated to techies, but I see it for what is really is... a pure unadulterated attempt to capture unsuspecting lemmings ready to follow Microsoft anywhere.

My vote... don't go there!