Subject: Comments requested for Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom

From: Steven Lees <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2007 15:45:56 -0700

Hello,

I'm seeking feedback on a specification that works in conjunction with Atom.

I'm part of the team at Microsoft that is developing Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). Adding SSE information to a feed enables loosely coupled data synchronization between multiple endpoints that are sharing the feed. The original version of SSE supported RSS as a feed format, and I've just posted to the web the latest version of the spec, which adds a binding for Atom feeds. The SSE spec is designed so that an SSE-annotated Atom feed is valid and can be consumed by any feed reader, even if that reader doesn't participate in sync.

The ability to sync data across endpoints in a loosely coupled way enables some interesting end user scenarios. Simplicity is one of the main design points for SSE, which means that the spec is suitable for implementation on relatively small devices as well as larger ones. The spec is released under a Creative Commons license, and our goal is to encourage a range of implementations of the spec for a wide variety of computing environments.

We've only recently added the Atom support in SSE, so we're very interested in feedback to make sure that the spec feels right from an Atom perspective. If you have any comments, I'd be happy to address them on the SSE mailing list, which lives here: http://discussms.hosting.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-MSD.exe?A0=FEED-TECH. (Discussion archives are available there as well.)

The updated spec, new FAQ, and new tutorials are all linked off this page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xml/bb190611.aspx. Direct links are:
    spec v0.93: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xml/bb510102.aspx
    FAQ: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xml/bb190616.aspx
    HTML/Javascript-based tutorials for Atom and RSS: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=53bb2bf8-71cc-433c-baac-367a5600a217&displaylang=en

Please feel free to forward this info to anyone who would be interested to comment on the Atom (or any other) aspects of the spec.

Thanks,
Steven Lees
CSA Concept Development Team
Microsoft