Okay, I’ve posted the news bits of this, now the opinion is starting to boil up.

Nick Finck led it off. Sadly, his post was based on an early-posting by News.com which was written BEFORE the presentation by Microsoft at Gnomedex AND before the Channel 9 demo of it.

So it was just a teeny tiny tad off.

Not Nick’s fault.

He seems to have centered his opinion down to two key points: “Why didn’t they use Atom”, and “Why wasn’t the community more involved”. These are both great points.

I’ve posted my response to this on his blog, but really I think these are open questions to Microsoft. Microsoft did WELL in this area, but do they deserve an A? Maybe a B-, in my opinion. They could have done better.

Here’s my response to Nick:

Nick: They are using Atom. I thought that was clear from both the video and from the Gnomedex presentation.

They really announced 3 things today:

1. The syndication platform, tied into Windows, that all Windows apps can tap into (which is great)
2. New RSS extension to allow it to tap into this platform completely
3. IE’s integration into this platform

So, everything the platform does, IE can do. And the platform works completely with Atom. So, #1 and #3 are as much about Atom as RSS.

You and I both know that the things they want RSS to do, it can’t do. So, they had 3 choices: break the RSS spec to make it do what they wanted, not use RSS, or extend the spec (as it’s designed to do).

Of those choices, I think they made the right one.

Tristan also posted a great post here.

And there’s some talk going on at EventBlogging.com (thanks to Nick for both links).

Overall I think this is a bit of a silly discussion. The changes to the RSS spec aren’t bad. The platform they announced was great. And IE’s way of doing feed discovery and integration into the platform was great. What wasn’t great was that Atom and earlier versions of RSS weren’t focussed on enough, and that the community weren’t involved enough.

Those are fair points, and ones I hope Microsoft, and Dean, will address.

Here’s the IE Blog post on the subject. Lots of feedback already.